Kolb Test

UNIVERSITATEA TRANSILVANIA DIN BRAȘOV
Centrul de Învăţământ la Distanţă

şi Învăţământ cu Frecvenţă Redusă
FACULTATEA DE LITERE
PROGRAM DE MASTER IFR:
CULTURĂ ȘI DISCURS ÎN SPAȚIUL ANGLO-AMERICAN
DISCURS POSTCOLONIAL
CURS PENTRU ÎNVĂȚĂMÂNT CU FRECVENȚĂ REDUSĂ
AUTOR: Liliana HAMZEA †

Tutore: Aura SIBIȘAN
ANUL I, SEM. I
Liliana HAMZEA †
DISCURS POSTCOLONIAL
CURS PENTRU ÎNVĂȚĂMÂNT CU FRECVENȚĂ REDUSĂ
ANUL I, SEM. I
Contents
Introduction
Unit One. Defining the Field of Postcolonialism ………………………….5
1.3. Basic Definitions

1.4. Theorists about Postcolonialism
1.5. Postcolonialism and Its Agenda
1.6. Colonial Discourse
1.7. Post-colonialism/ Postcolonialism
1.8. Summary
1.9. End of Unit Assessment
Unit Two. Terminology and Ideological Borders ………….………………. 20
2.3. African-American and Postcolonial Studies

2.4. Alterity
2.5. Anti-colonialism
2.6. Binarism
2.7. Theoretical Models of the World Order
2.8. Summary
Unit Three. Race, Ethnicity, Gender, Class……………..…………………… 29
3. 3. Ethnicity
3.4. Race
3.5. Franz Fanon’s Contribution
3.6. Feminism and Postcolonialism
3.7. Class and Postcolonialism
3.8. Summary
3.9 End of Unit Assessment
Mid-term Assignment ……………………………………………………… 43
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Unit Four. The Globalized World ……………………………..………………45
4.3. Defining Globalization

4.4. Globalization, Hybridity, Diaspora
4.5. Other / Otherness
4.6. Cultural Diversity / Cultural Difference
4.7. Summary
Unit Five. The Great Tradition ………………………..………………………..54
5.3. The East and West Divide

5.4. Nationalism and National Culture
5.5. Unit Assessment
5.6. Summary
Unit Six. Cultural Stereotypes and Colonial Mimicry ………………………….66
6.3. Colonial Mimicry

6.4. Cultural stereotypes
6.6. Summary
Final Assignment …………………………………………………………………..72
References
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Introduction
The present course deals with some conceptual and theoretical issues specific to postcolonial
studies. Far from covering all the major aspects of postcolonial theory, it attempts to clarify its
ideological positions and arguments, relying on the texts of some major contributors in the
field, Edward Said, Franz Fanon, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak. The theoretical part is
constructed around basic concepts, while the practical part consists of illustrations with texts
given for analysis in various assessment tasks.
The focus is on colonial / postcolonial discourse, its construction and implications in

constructing identity, its strategies of justification, stereotyping or mimicry, its biased nature.
Some general topics like globalization, race and ethnicity, are approached from the specific
focus of postcolonialism. The course is structured in 6 units, each of them being allotted two
or three hours of study. The units are divided into subchapters and each unit has an
introduction, a summary and an assessment task.
Course Objectives
The main objective of the course is to clarify the terminology, the field and
theoretical framework related to postcolonialism. It is intended to offer insight into
some major contemporary issues and to give access to less known fields of
experience from a cultural perspective.
The specific competences developed by the course are:

- defining concepts and discussing them in various contexts
- comparing ideological positions
- making distinctions between colonial and postcolonial discourses
- discussing issues related to discrimination, stereotyping, identity construction,
cultural diversity.
Resources
For the understanding of this course and the successful performance of the tasks of
each unit students need a good level of English.
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Course Structure
The Course in Postcolonial Discourse is structured in six units, which are further
divided into parts referring to various postcolonial or related issues. The first two
units are focused on conceptual definitions, offering an introduction to the field
and its representative thinkers. The other four units are more topic oriented,
analyzing issues like race, ethnicity, globalization and new identities, nationalism
and national culture, Orientalism, cultural stereotypes and colonial mimicry.
There is an assessment task at the end of each unit, either in the form of questions
or as a text interpretation. The texts are taken from journals in the field or from
major works by postcolonial thinkers. There are two Assignment tasks as well in
the form of essays on topics related to the content of the units.
Average Study Time

The average study time for the units is two or three hours, including the End of
unit tests.
Evaluation
The final grade for the course will include a test with 2-3 general questions,
amounting to 50%, and the answers to the Assignment tasks representing 50%.
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UNIT ONE: Defining the Field of Postcolonialism
1.1. Introduction
This introductory unit presents the scope of the field and the definition of the
major concepts of postcolonial studies like subaltern, essentialism, colonial
discourse theory.
The contributions of the best-known postcolonial thinkers are introduced, namely
Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak and Franz Fanon. The second half of the unit is
focused purely on extended definitions of terms like alterity, anti-colonialism,
binarism, and the difference between African-American and postcolonial studies.
1.2. Competences
The students become familiar with the basic terminology and the theoretical
framework of postcolonialism. The concepts they acquire are used in definitions
and in discussions about postcolonial issues.
Study time for UNIT ONE: 3 hours
1.3. Basic definitions
The term postcolonialism is one which cannot be easily defined. It has given way to many
misunderstandings due to its ambiguous nature.
Postcolonialism is a specifically postmodern intellectual discourse, which consists of

reactions to, and an analysis of the cultural legacy of colonialism. It designates a set of
theoretical approaches which focus on the direct effects and aftermaths of colonization.
Therefore, postcolonialism forms a powerful intellectual and critical movement which revives
the perception and understanding of modern history, cultural studies, literary criticism and
political economy. However, we cannot fully grasp the meaning and purpose of
postcolonialism, if we do not mention certain aspects of colonialism.
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Colonialism is a term that refers to the political ideologies which legitimated the modern
invasion, occupation and exploitation of inhabited lands by overwhelming outside military
powers. For the local / colonized populations, it implied the forceful elimination of resistance,
the imposition of outside rules and the parasitic utilization of natural resources, including
manpower. The term of colonialism appeared in the context of Marxism and became a
cornerstone of resistance during the 20th century. It was meant to counter the positive
connotations attached to the use of colonization, understood as a legitimate civilizing process,
by calling attention to its real economic motivations and accusing its ruthless oppression.
There are distinctions between colonialism and imperialism. According to the Marxists,
colonialism, the conquest and direct control of other people’s land, ‘is a particular phase in
the history of imperialism, which is now best understood as the globalization of the capitalist
mode of production, its penetration of previously non-capitalist regions of the world, and its
destruction of pre- and non-capitalist forms of social organization’. Starting from the 17th
century, capitalism spread outward from Europe by means of trade, conquest, economic and
military power, to the point where it now builds a truly global economy. The colonial phase,
especially the rapid acquisition of territories by European nations in the late nineteenth
century, represents the need to access new markets and sources of materials, as well as the
desire to deny these lands to competitor nations.
Postcolonial theory was centred on destabilizing the Western way of thinking, therefore
creating space for marginalized groups, known as the subaltern, in order for them to speak
and produce alternatives to the dominant discourse. This dominant discourse has been
produced until recently by “authorities” in various fields of knowledge or politics, those
having the power or position to formulate truths for the whole of mankind. These “expert”
voices are labelled as DWEMS (dead, white, European males).
Very often the term postcolonialism is taken literally, to mean the period of time after
colonialism. However, this perception is somewhat problematic, because the once colonized
world is full of contradictions, of half-finished processes, of confusions and limitations after
the departure of the colonizers. In other words, it is important to accept the plural nature of the
word postcolonialism, as it does not simply refer to the period after the colonial era.
Postcolonialism can also be seen as a continuation of colonialism, through different or new
relationships concerning power and the control of knowledge.
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Postcolonialism has a dual nature. Indeed, on the one hand, post-colonial may refer to the
status of land that is no longer colonized and has regained its political independence. It is well
known that long periods of forced dependency had a profound negative impact on the social
and cultural levels of these societies. However, this may also apply to the former colonizers in
the sense that the eventual loss of the societies they conquered, perceived as profitable
possessions, deeply influenced the course of their economic and cultural evolution.
On the other hand, post-colonialism may designate the new forms of economic and cultural
oppression that have succeeded colonialism, sometimes called neo-colonialism. This term
tends to point out the fact that cooperation, assistance and modernization are in fact new
forms of political and cultural domination, as destructive as the former colonialism was. What
we must understand here is the devaluation of indigenous ways of life and their displacement
by the ethos of dominant Western nations, which were and still are technologically more
advanced. These spelling and ideological differences will be discussed later in this unit in
more detail.
However, it is truly remarkable how there was, and still is, a resistance to the West, on behalf
of the (former) colonized nations. And what postcolonialism actually did, was to recognize
this resistance, practiced by many, including the subaltern, a group of marginalized, having
the least power of representation.
Domination and inequities of power and wealth are major aspects of imperialism. The nations
of contemporary Africa, Asia and Latin America are politically independent, but in reality
they are as dominated and dependent as they were when ruled directly by European powers. It
is interesting to observe how the imperial past lives on. These traces of the past in the present
are a guideline to a study of histories created by empire. But these are not just the stories of
white men and women, but also those of the non-whites, whose lands were at issue and whose
claims were either ignored or denied.
This unfortunate situation was, on the one hand, due to the fact that those who were non-white
and different from us were to be blamed for what they are; on the other hand, simply blaming
the Europeans for the misfortunes of the present is merely a futile deed. One should not
pretend that models for a peaceful and harmonious world order are ready at hand, because
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even if some have already come up with such ideas of peace and community, the truth is that
they couldn’t even stand a chance when power is so aggressively applied. We are all taught to
venerate our own nations and admire our traditions only, thus denying the others’ identities
and interests with toughness and even contempt. The obvious results of such a mentality and
behavior are fractured societies, separated peoples, bloody conflicts and greed. So what we
have here is a vicious circle, and trying to find an answer or a solution to this issue will only
lead to dead ends.
For centuries, colonial peoples have endured injustice, unending economic oppression,
distortion of their social and intimate lives and a submission that knew no limits. This is what
European superiority actually meant. Violent colonial interventions were registered every
hour and every minute in the lives of individuals and collectivities.
1.4. Theorists about Postcolonialism
This subchapter presents briefly the opinion and point of view of three notable theoreticians
and experts on the subject of postcolonialism, namely Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak and Franz Fanon.
Edward Said, the American theorist of Palestinian origin, invented the term Orientalism,
which he used as the title of his probably most famous book, published in 1978. In it, Said
described the binary opposition between the Orient and the Occident. This binary, also known
as the East/West binary, is a key concept in postcolonial theory. Said emphasized the idea that
the Occident could not exist without the Orient and vice versa.
However, if we were to see things from a Western point of view, we would surely notice their
superior mentality. According to it, the concept of the East, or the Orient, was created by the
West, suppressing thus the ability of the Orient to express itself. The West usually depicted
the East as an inferior, uncivilized world, as a place of backwardness, irrationality and
savagery. This allowed the West to identify itself as the opposite of these characteristics,
namely as a superior world that was progressive, rational and civilized. Therefore, the Orient
was in desperate need of help to become modern, in the European sense. And in order to do
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so, the colonized had to adopt a Western thought, reasoning and language, leaving thus behind
everything that was once theirs.
The Indian postcolonialist thinker, G. Spivak’s main contribution to postcolonial theory came
with her specific definition of the term subaltern. Generally speaking, this term refers to
persons who are socially, politically and geographically outside of the hegemonic power
structure. Many thinkers use the term to refer to marginalized groups and lower classes.
Others, such as Spivak, use it in a more specific sense. She argues that subaltern is not just a
word for the oppressed, or for the Other, but a term that refers to everything that has limited
or no access to the cultural imperialism – a space of difference. Thus she strongly opposed
and criticized those who ignored the subaltern.
Spivak also introduced the term of essentialism, which refers to the dangers of reviving
subaltern voices in ways that might simplify heterogeneous groups, creating thus stereotyped
impressions and images of their diverse groups. She, however, believes that essentialism can
sometimes be used strategically by these groups, in order to make it easier for the subaltern to
be heard and understood, whenever a clear identity can be created and accepted by the
majority.
Franz Fanon is one of the earliest writers ever to be associated with postcolonialism. In his
book entitled The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon analyzed the nature and effects of colonialism
and those subjugated by it. He described colonialism as source of violence, rather than
reacting violently against it, which had actually been the common view at the time. He
portrayed the relationship between colonialism and its attempts to deny ‘all attributes of
humanity’ to those it suppressed, thus laying the groundwork for related critical approaches of
the colonial and postcolonial systems.
These thinkers will be analyzed in more detail later in the course, but this brief presentation
was necessary as their names appear quite frequently throughout the course.
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1.5. Postcolonialism and Its Agenda
The ultimate goal of postcolonialism is combating the remaining effects of colonialism on

various cultures, once conquered by the West. However, it is not simply concerned with
salvaging past worlds, but learning how the world can move beyond this period towards a
place of mutual respect.
A key goal of postcolonial theorists is clearing space for multiple voices. This mainly refers to
those voices that have been previously silenced by dominant ideologies, namely the subaltern.
Much debate has taken place regarding how to effectively and fairly incorporate the subaltern
voice into social studies. As expected, there has been a huge mass of criticism on behalf of
social scientists against the idea of studying others, for they felt paralyzed and saw it as an
impossibility. Spivak clearly rejects this mentality. She recognizes that the project of studying
others is to certain extent problematic, as the recovery and presentation of a subaltern voice
would likely essentialize its message, negating thus its heterogeneity. Spivak, who has also
been concerned with the fate of the subaltern, suggests strategic essentialism, namely
speaking on behalf of a group, while using a clear image of identity to fight opposition; she
considers that an organized voice provides a more powerful challenge to dominant
knowledge.
Fanon offered a less bright and more violent prescription for fighting against colonialism and
its effects. He emphasized the fact that previously colonized peoples would remain hybrids
with a schizophrenic identity unless they violently revolt against their oppressors. From his
point of view, this collective action would hopefully stimulate and enhance collective pride,
freeing them of their inferiority complexes.
Postcolonialism is therefore seen as a hopeful discourse and as the key to mending all of the
harms caused by colonial rule. All poscolonial theorists and theory admit that colonialism still
continues to affect the former colonies after political independence, but by exposing a
culture’s colonial history, postcolonial theory empowers a society with the ability to value
itself. The very prefix ‘post-‘ defines the discipline as one that looks forward to a world that
has truly moved beyond all that colonialism entailed. So we may draw the conclusion, that
postcolonialism aims at decolonizing the future, thus creating a better place for everyone.
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1.6. Colonial Discourse
This is a term brought into currency by Edward Said who used Foucault's notion of discourse
for describing that system referring to the range of practices termed 'colonial'. Said's study of
colonial discourse, Orientalism, examined the ways in which colonial discourse operated as
an instrument of power, initiating what came to be known as colonial discourse theory, a
field which started to be known in the 1980s. The best known colonial discourse theorist,
apart from Said, is Homi Bhabha, whose analysis posited certain disabling contradictions
within colonial relationships, such as hybridity, ambivalence and mimicry, which revealed
the inherent vulnerability of colonial discourse. All these issues are discussed in Bhabha’s
seminal book The Location of Culture.
Discourse, as Foucault theorizes it, is a system of statements within which the world can be
known. It is the system by which dominant groups in society constitute the field of truth by
imposing a specific knowledge, disciplines and values upon dominated groups. As a social
formation it works to constitute reality not only for the objects it appears to represent but also
for the subjects who form the community on which it depends. Consequently, colonial
discourse is the complex of signs and practices that organize social existence and social
reproduction within colonial relationships.
Colonial discourse is greatly involved in ideas of the centrality of Europe, and thus in
assumptions that have become characteristic of modernity: assumptions about history,
language, literature and 'technology'. Colonial discourse is thus a system of statements that
can be made about colonies and colonial peoples, about colonizing powers and about the
relationship between these two. It is the system of knowledge and beliefs about the world
within which acts of colonization take place. Although it is generated within the society and
cultures of the colonizers, it becomes that discourse within which the colonized may also
come to see themselves. A colonial type of discourse creates a deep conflict in the
consciousness of the colonized because of its clash with other types of knowledge about the
world. The assumption of the superiority of the colonizer's culture, history, language, art,
political structures, social conventions, and the assertion of the need for the colonized to be
'raised up' through colonial contact create rules of inclusion and exclusion, of centrality and
marginality. In particular, colonial discourse hinges on notions of race that begin to emerge
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at the very advent of European imperialism. Through such distinctions it comes to represent
the colonized, whatever the nature of their social structures and cultural histories, as
'primitive' and the colonizers as 'civilized'.
Colonial discourse tends to exclude, of course, statements about the exploitation of the
resources of the colonized, the political status of the colonizing powers, the economic
importance of the development of an empire, all of which may be compelling reasons for
maintaining colonial ties. Rather it conceals these benefits in statements about the inferiority
of the colonized, the primitive nature of other races, the barbaric depravity of colonized
societies, and therefore the duty of the imperial power to reproduce itself in the colonial
society, and to advance the civilization of the colony through trade, administration, cultural
and moral improvement. Such is the power of colonial discourse that individual colonizing
subjects are often not aware of the duplicity of their position, for colonial discourse constructs
the colonizing subject as much as the colonized. Statements that contradict the discourse
cannot be made either without incurring punishment, or without making the individuals who
make those statements appear eccentric and abnormal.
The term colonialism is important in defining the specific form of cultural exploitation that
developed with the expansion of Europe over the last 400 years. Although many earlier
civilizations had colonies, and although they perceived their relations with them in terms of a
central Empire in relation to a periphery of provincial, marginal and barbarian cultures, a
number of crucial factors entered into the construction of the post-Renaissance practices of
imperialism. Edward Said offers the following distinction: '“imperialism” means the practice,
the theory, and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan centre ruling a distant territory;
“colonialism”, which is almost always a consequence of imperialism, is the implanting of
settlements on distant territory'.
The scale and variety of colonial settlements generated by the expansion of European society
after the Renaissance shows why the term colonialism has been seen to be a distinctive form
of the more general ideology of imperialism. Although Said's formula, which uses
'imperialism' for the ideological force and 'colonialism' for the practice, is a generally useful
distinction, European colonialism in the post-Renaissance world became a sufficiently
specialized and historically specific form of imperial expansion to justify its current general
usage as a distinctive kind of political ideology.
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The fact that European post-Renaissance colonial expansion took place simultaneously with
the development of a modern capitalist system of economic exchange meant that the
perception of the colonies as primarily established to provide raw materials for the burgeoning
economies of the colonial powers was greatly strengthened and institutionalized. It also meant
that the relation between the colonizer and colonized was locked into a rigid hierarchy of
difference that rules out fair and equitable exchanges, whether economic, cultural or social.
In colonies where the subject people were of a different race, or where minority indigenous
peoples existed, the ideology of race was also a crucial part of the construction and
naturalization of an unequal form of intercultural relations. Race itself, with its accompanying
racism and racial prejudice, was largely a product of the same post-Renaissance period, and a
justification for the treatment of enslaved peoples after the development of the slave trade of
the Atlantic Middle Passage from the late sixteenth century onwards. In such situations the
idea of the colonial world became one of a people intrinsically inferior, not just outside
history and civilization, but genetically pre-determined to inferiority. Their subjection was not
just a matter of profit and convenience but also could be constructed as a natural state. The
idea of the 'evolution of mankind' and the survival of the fittest 'race', in the crude application
of Social Darwinism, went hand in hand with the doctrines of imperialism that evolved at the
end of the nineteenth century.
The sexist exclusivity of these discourses (man, mankind, etc.) demonstrated their ideological
alliance with patriarchal practices, as numerous feminist and postcolonialist commentators
have noted. As a result of these new formulations, colonization could be (re)presented as a
virtuous and necessary 'civilizing' task involving education. An example of this is Kipling's
famous admonition to America in 1899 to 'Take up the White Man's Burden' after their war
against Spain in the Philippines rather than follow their own anti-colonial model and offer the
Filipinos independence and nationhood. Thus starting with the twentieth century colonialism
developed an ideology rooted in justification, and its violent and essentially unjust processes
became increasingly difficult to perceive due to the discourses about the civilizing 'task' and
paternalistic 'development' and 'aid' offered to the colonies by the ‘civilized’ world. The
development of such territorial designators as 'Protectorates', 'Trust Territories',
'Condominiums', etc. served to justify the continuing process of colonialism as well as to hide
the fact that these territories were the displaced sites of the increasingly violent struggles for
markets and raw materials by the industrialized nations of the West.
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The idea of race penetrated even the perception of non-indigenous inhabitants of settler
colonies (‘white’ settlers), who were seen as culturally inferior or characterized as having
wholly degenerated ('gone native' ) from contact with other races, as in the case of white
Creoles in the West Indies or, in the case of settler colonies such as Canada or Australia, as
having developed specific limited colonial characteristics (physical prowess, sporting ability)
but not others (cultural and social sophistication). The practice of characterizing 'colonial'
peoples by signifiers of naivety, of social and cultural provinciality was a feature of English
texts even in the early twentieth century.
By the end of the nineteenth century, colonialism had developed into a system of a-historical
categorization in which certain societies and cultures were perceived as intrinsically inferior.
In Britain, by the end of the nineteenth century, a domestic programme for the function of
Empire could be clearly discerned, as Victorian society faced increasing internal dissension
and division (Disraeli's 'Two Nations'). The doctrine of the New Imperialism was in many
ways Disraeli's response to his perception that Britain was divided into two nations of rich
and poor, industrial and non-industrial. Empire became the principal ideological unifying
factor across class and other social divisions in Britain. It was to be the principal icon of
national unity in the face of the widely perceived social threat of class unrest and revolution
that had arisen in post-industrial British society. The Other (the colonized) existed as a
primary means of defining the colonizer and of creating a sense of unity beneath such
differences as class and wealth and between the increasingly polarized life of the
industrialized cities that developed the wealth and that of the traditional countryside. The
colonialist system permitted a notional idea of improvement for the colonized, via such
metaphors as parent/child, tree/branch, etc., which in theory allowed that at some future time
the inferior colonials might be raised to the status of the colonizer. But in practice this future
was always endlessly deferred.
It is significant that no society ever attained full freedom from the colonial system by the
voluntary, active disengagement of the colonial power until it was provoked by a considerable
internal struggle for self-determination or, most usually, by extended and active violent
opposition by the colonized. It is one of the great myths of recent British colonial history in
particular that the granting of independence to its colonies was the result of a proactive and
deliberate policy of enlightenment on the part of the British people, a policy that distinguished
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British colonialism from the inferior and more rapacious European brands. Such readings are,
of course, part of the construction of the ideology of late nineteenth-century imperialism in
which literary representation played an important part, whether actively as in the work of
Kipling, or in a more ambivalent way in the works of Conrad. Despite the anti-imperial strain
in some of his writing, Conrad continues to distinguish actively between the English model of
colonialism, which has 'an ideal at the back of it', and the mere rapacity of the imperialism of
'lesser breeds' of imperialists. These specious distinctions are projected back into the
narratives of the rapacious Spanish conquistadores, though the British treatment of the Indians
in Virginia differed from that of the Spanish only in quantity not in the degree of its brutality.
Even the granting of Dominion status or limited independence to white settler cultures was
the result of long constitutional and political struggles and was made dependent on the
retention of legal and constitutional links with the Crown that limited the right of those
societies to conduct their own affairs and to develop their own systems of justice or
governance. In such societies, of course, the indigenous peoples were not granted even the
most limited form of citizenship under these new constitutional models. In Western Australia,
for example, even in the 1920s, the Government Department that had charge of Aboriginal
affairs was called the Department of Fisheries, Forests, Wildlife and Aborigines. Recent
attempts to 'offload' the guilt of colonial policies onto the colonial 'settlers' as a convenient
scapegoat emphasize the periods when metropolitan, government policy was more
enlightened than that of the local settlers. But in general such ideological discriminations were
in no sense alien to the spirit of the metropolitan, colonial powers that had set up these
colonies, nor did this essentially discriminatory attitude on the part of the 'home' country
change after the granting of federal or dominion status. Racial discrimination was, in the
majority of cases, a direct extension of colonial policy and continued to receive both overt and
covert support from the ex-colonial powers as well as from the newly emerging power of
America throughout the period up to and even after the Second World War.
Such policies of racial discrimination reached their climax in South African Apartheid, which
had its roots in earlier colonial discriminatory policies. In the case of societies where the
factor of race was less easily resolved by such internal discriminatory categorizations, the
importance of racial discrimination was even more obvious. British India and European
African colonies, for example, had to engage in a long and frequently bloody process of
dissent, protest and rebellion to secure their independence. It is also significant that in those
cases where European colonial powers held on longest, for example the Portuguese colonies,
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they were often able to do so and indeed were encouraged to do so by the degree to which
their colonial governments were really only a front for a 'broader imperialism'. Similarly, the
nationalist government in South Africa was able to survive only because it was supported by
the investment of those very countries who were supposedly opposed to the regime. Thus
colonialism, far from disappearing as the century goes on, too often merely modified and
developed into the neo-colonialism of the post-independence period.
1.7. Post-colonialism / Postcolonialism
Post-colonialism (or often postcolonialism) deals with the effects of colonization on cultures
and societies. As originally used by historians after the Second World War in terms such as
the post-colonial state, 'post-colonial' had a clearly chronological meaning, designating the
post-independence period. However, from the late 1970s the term has been used by theorists
to discuss the various cultural effects of colonization.
Although the study of the controlling power of representation in colonized societies had
begun in the late 1970s with texts such as Said's Orientalism, and led to the development of
what came to be called colonialist discourse theory in the work of critics such as Spivak and
Bhabha, the actual term 'post-colonial' was not employed in these early studies of the power
of colonialist discourse to shape and form opinion and policy in the colonies and metropolis.
Although the study of the effects of colonial representation were central to the work of these
critics, the term 'post-colonial' per se was first used to refer to cultural interactions within
colonial societies in literary circles (e.g. Ashcroft et al. The Empire Writes Back, 1977). This
was part of an attempt to politicize and focus the concerns of fields such as Commonwealth
literature and the study of the so-called New Literatures in English which had been initiated in
the late 1960s. The term has subsequently been widely used to signify the political, linguistic
and cultural experience of societies that were former European colonies.
Thus the term was a potential site of disciplinary and interpretative contestation almost from
the beginning, especially the implications involved in the signifying hyphen or its absence.
The heavily post-structuralist influence (Foucalult, Althusser, Lacan, Derrida) on the major
exponents of colonial discourse theory, led many critics, concerned to focus on the material
effects of the historical condition of colonialism, as well as on its discursive power, to insist
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on the hyphen to distinguish post-colonial studies as a field from colonial discourse theory per
se, which formed only one aspect of the many approaches and interests that the term 'post-
colonial' sought to embrace and discuss.
While this distinction in spelling still exists, the interweaving of the two approaches is
considerable. 'Post-colonialism/ postcolonialism' is now used in wide and diverse ways to
include the study and analysis of European territorial conquests, the various institutions of
European colonialisms, the discursive operations of empire, the subtleties of subject
construction in colonial discourse and the resistance of those subjects, and, most importantly
perhaps, the differing responses to such incursions and their contemporary colonial legacies in
both pre- and post-independence nations and communities. While its use has tended to focus
on the cultural production of such communities, it is becoming widely used in historical,
political, sociological and economic analyses, as these disciplines continue to engage with the
impact of European imperialism upon world societies.
The prefix 'post' in the term also continues to be a source of vigorous debate amongst critics.
The simpler sense of the 'post' as meaning 'after' colonialism has been contested by a more
elaborate understanding of the working of post-colonial cultures which stresses the
articulations between and across the politically defined historical periods, of pre-colonial,
colonial and post-independence cultures. As a result, further questions have been asked about
what limits, if any, should be set round the term. It is clear, however, that post-colonialism as
it has been employed in most recent accounts has been primarily concerned to examine the
processes and effects of European colonialism from the sixteenth century up to and including
the neo-colonialism of the present day.
No doubt the disputes will continue, since 'post-colonialism', is now used in its various fields,
to describe a remarkably heterogeneous set of subject positions, professional fields, and
critical enterprises:
It has been used as a way of ordering a critique of totalizing forms of Western
historicism; as a portmanteau term for a retooled notion of 'class', as a subset of both
postmodernism and post-structuralism (and conversely, as the condition from which
those two structures of cultural logic and cultural critique themselves are seen to
emerge); as the name for a condition of nativist longing in post-independence national
groupings; as a cultural marker of non-residency for a Third World intellectual cadre;
17
as the inevitable underside of a fractured and ambivalent discourse of colonialist
power; as an oppositional form of 'reading practice'; and—and this was my first
encounter with the term—as the name for a category of 'literary' activity which sprang
from a new and welcome political energy going on within what used to be called
'Commonwealth' literary studies. (Slemon in Ashcroft 1994)
Yet the term still continues to be used from time to time to mean simply 'anti-colonial' and to
be synonymous with 'post-independence', as in references to the post-colonial state. Slemon is
well aware of the problems of terminology:
Colonialism, obviously is an enormously problematic category: it is by definition
transhistorical and unspecific, and it is used in relation to very different kinds of
historical oppression and economic control. [Nevertheless] like the term 'patriarchy',
which shares similar problems in definition, the concept of colonialism…remains
crucial to a critique of past and present power relations in world affairs. (Slemon in
Ashcroft 1994)
Slemon as well as other theorists, also speak about the agency of the colonized people. Post-
colonial societies have their own internal agendas and forces that continue to interact with and
modify the direct response to the colonial incursion. Clearly any definition of post-
colonialism needs to include a consideration of this wider set of local and specific ongoing
concerns and practices. It is unlikely that these debates will be easily resolved. At the present
time, though, no matter how we conceive of 'the post-colonial', and whatever the debates
around the use of the problematic prefix 'post', or the equally problematic hyphen, the
grounding of the term in European colonialist histories and institutional practices, and the
responses to these practices on the part of all colonized peoples, remain fundamental.
An equally fundamental constraint is attention to precise location. Every colonial encounter or

'contact zone' is different, and each 'post-colonial' occasion needs, against these general
background principles, to be precisely located and analyzed for its specific interplay. A
vigorous debate has revolved around the potentially homogenizing effect of the term 'post-
colonial'. The effect of describing the colonial experience of a great range of cultures by this
term, it is argued, is to elide the differences between them. However, there is no inherent or
inevitable reason for this to occur. The materiality and locality of various kinds of post-
18
colonial experience are precisely what provide the richest potential for post-colonial studies,
and they enable the specific analysis of the various effects of colonial discourse.
1.8. Summary
This introduction to postcolonial theory and discourse focused on clarifying some
basic concepts while discussing issues that have been debated over the last decades.
Several terms are presented in their variation and with their alternatives, as the
terminology is flexible sometimes. Some of the founders of postcolonial studies are
mentioned, especially Edward Said, Franz Fanon and Gayatri Spivak.
- Discuss the distinction between colonialism and imperialism

- What particular meanings are associated with post-colonialism? Is this
term different from postcolonialism?
- What is the essence of Orientalism in Said’s view?
- How does Foucault theorize discourse? Why is it important in
postcolonial studies?
- Define postcolonial discourse and its implications.
- Explain the theory of Social Darwinism in relation with the idea of race
- Comment on the ideology and discourses of justification according to
postcolonialism
- What myth(s) of the British colonial history can you mention?
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UNIT TWO: Terminology and Ideological Borders
2.1. Introduction
This unit continues the process of concept clarification and explains some key
terms such as alterity, African-American studies, anti-colonialism and binarism.
Thus the scope of postcolonial studies is more deeply perceived in connection with
other areas of knowledge to which postcolonialism, as an interdisciplinary field, is
related.
2.2. Competences
Students will be able to differentiate between study areas related to
postcolonialism and will be able to explain and use some concepts in an adequate
way
Study time for UNIT TWO: 2 hours
2.3. African-American and Postcolonial Studies
Recent work in postcolonial studies by United States' scholars has stressed the relationship
between postcolonial theory and the analysis of African American culture. In practice, the
exponents of African American culture have often engaged with classic post-colonial theorists
such as Fanon. African American studies has been one of the most influential of recent
intellectual, social and political movements, not only affecting the US but also influencing
many people who have suffered oppression from racial discrimination in other parts of the
world. It has had a widespread and often quite separate development from post-colonial
studies, to which it is related only in an ambiguous way.
Most postcolonial theorists who have engaged with the issue have seen the study of black
culture in the Americas as the study of one of the world's major diasporas. In this respect, the
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history of African Americans has some features in common with other movements of
oppressed diasporic peoples. Many groups were moved against their will from their
homelands to serve the economic needs of empire in the societies that evolved from the wave
of European expansion from the sixteenth century onwards. Comparative studies of these
movements are a productive development in recent post-colonial theory, not least in the
consideration of the different effects of these large-scale events on individual groups that such
studies reveal.
Early formulations of African American Studies in the United States reflected the complex
relationship between the African source cultures and their adopted societies, as they interacted
with other influences in the new regions to which Africans were taken .The fact that the bulk
of African peoples were shipped under conditions of slavery makes the relationship between
that institution and the wider practices of imperialism central to an understanding of the
origins of African American culture. It also sheds light on the violence that was often hidden
beneath the civilizing rhetoric of imperialism. Beyond this prime fact of oppression and
violence, however, the relationships between the newly independent American societies, the
wider diasporic black movement, and the modern independence movements in Africa itself,
remain complex.
The history of the struggle for self-determination by African Americans is historically

intertwined with wider movements of diasporic African struggles for independence. For
example, figures like Jamaican born Marcus Garvey assumed a central role in the American
struggle for self-determination. The 'Back to Africa' movement that he initiated, and which
has affinities with the modern West Indian movement of Rastafarianism, had its most notable
effect in the founding of Liberia, whose national flag still bears the single star of Garvey's
Black Star shipping company, set up specifically to facilitate the return of freed black slaves
to their 'native' continent. In addition, many of the dominant figures in early African
nationalism, such as Alexander Crummell, were ex-slaves who had their ideas formed in the
struggle for African American freedom. Of course, African American studies are also
concerned much more directly with the history and continuing effects of specific processes of
race-based discrimination within US society. In this regard, African American studies
investigates issues that share certain features with other US groups affected by racial
discrimination, such as the Chicano community. These studies have relevance to movements
for the freedom of indigenous peoples, such as Native American Indians or Inuit peoples,
21
despite their very different historical backgrounds (one group being victims of invasive
settlement and the other of slavery and exile). Distinctions also need to be made between
these various groups and linguistically and racially discriminated groups such as Chicanos, a
great many of whom are part of a more recent wave of immigration, though some, of course,
are the descendants of peoples who lived in parts of the US long before the current dominant
Anglo-Saxon peoples. Other groups, such as the descendants of French Creoles, also occupy
places contiguous in some respects to these latter Spanish speaking peoples, though their
history and their treatment within US society may have been very different. For this, and other
reasons, critics have often hesitated to conflate African American studies or the study of any
of these other groups with post-colonial theory in any simple way.
2.4 Alterity
Alterity is derived from the Latin alteritas, meaning 'the state of being other or different;
diversity, otherness'. Its English derivatives are alternate, alternative, alternation, and alter
ego. The term alterité is more common in French, and has the antonym identité
The term was adopted by philosophers as an alternative to 'otherness' to register a change in

the Western perceptions of the relationship between consciousness and the world. Since
Descartes, individual consciousness had been taken as the privileged starting point for
consciousness, and 'the “other” appears in the post-Enlightenment philosophies as an
epistemological question. That is, in a concept of the human in which everything stems from
the notion that 'I think, therefore I am', the chief concern with the other is to be able to answer
questions such as 'How can I know the other?', 'How can other minds be known?' The term
'alterity' shifts the focus of analysis away from these philosophic concerns with otherness—
the 'epistemic other', the other that is only important to the extent to which it can be known—
to the more concrete 'moral other'—the other who is actually located in a political, cultural,
linguistic or religious context. This is a key feature of changes in the concept of subjectivity,
because, whether seen in the context of ideology, psychoanalysis or discourse, the
construction of the subject itself can be seen to be inseparable from the construction of its
others.
Literary theorists commonly see the most influential use of alterity in Mikhail Bakhtin's
description of the way in which an author moves away from identification with a character.
22
The novelist must understand his or her character from within, as it were, but must also
perceive it as other, as apart from its creator in its distinct alterity.
Importantly, dialogue is only possible with an 'other', so alterity, in Bakhtin's formulation, is

not simply 'exclusion', but an apartness that stands as a precondition of dialogue, where
dialogue implies a transference across and between differences of culture, gender, class and
other social categories. This is related to his concept of 'exotopy' or 'outsideness', which is a
precondition for the author's ability to understand and formulate a character, a precondition
for dialogue itself.
In postcolonial theory, the term has often been used interchangeably with otherness and
difference. However, the distinction that initially held between otherness and alterity—that
between otherness as a philosophic problem and otherness as a feature of a material and
discursive location—is peculiarly applicable to post-colonial discourse. The self-identity of
the colonizing subject, indeed the identity of imperial culture, is inextricable from the alterity
of colonized others, an alterity determined, according to Spivak, by a process of othering.
The possibility for potential dialogue between racial and cultural others has also remained an
important aspect of the use of the word, which distinguishes it from its synonyms.
2.5. Anti-colonialism
Anti-colonialism refers to the political struggle of colonized peoples against the specific
ideology and practice of colonialism. Anti-colonialism signifies the point at which the various
forms of opposition become articulated as a resistance to the operations of colonialism in
political, economic and cultural institutions. It emphasizes the need to reject colonial power
and restore local control. Paradoxically, anti-colonialist movements often expressed
themselves in the appropriation and subversion of forms borrowed from the institutions of the
colonizer and turned back on them. Thus the struggle was often articulated in terms of a
discourse of anti-colonial 'nationalism' in which the form of the modern European nation-state
was taken over and employed as a sign of resistance. The sometimes arbitrary forms of
colonial governance—such as the structures of public administration and forums for local
political representation—became the spaces within which a discourse of anti-colonial
nationalism was focused and a demand for an independent post-colonial nation-state was
formed.
23
Anti-colonialism has taken many forms in different colonial situations: it is sometimes
associated with an ideology of racial liberation, as in the case of nineteenth-century West
African nationalists such as Edward Wilmot Blyden and James Africanus Horton (ideologies
that might be seen as the precursors of twentieth-century movements such as négritude ). Or,
it may accompany a demand for a recognition of cultural differences on a broad level, as in
the Indian National Congress which sought to unite a variety of ethnic groups with different
religious and racial identities in a single, national independence movement.
In the second half of the twentieth century, anti-colonialism was often articulated in
terms of a radical, Marxist discourse of liberation, and in constructions that sought to
reconcile the internationalist and anti-élitist demands of Marxism with the nationalist
sentiments of the period (National Liberation Fronts), in the work and theory of early
national liberationist thinkers such as Amilcar Cabral and Frantz Fanon. Such anti-
colonial, national liberation movements developed the Marxist idea of a revolutionary
cadre to explain the crucial role of the European (colonial) educated intelligentsia in
the anti-colonial struggle.
Cabral's contribution has received less recognition than that of Fanon, whose political practice
was arguably less developed, though his theories of the formation of colonial consciousness
were amongst the most powerful contributions to the creation of an effective anti-colonial
discourse. Anti-colonialism frequently perceived resistance to be the product of a fixed and
definitive relationship in which colonizer and colonized were in absolute and implacable
opposition. As such it was less a feature of settler colonies, where a more obvious form of
complicity occurred between the colonial power and the settler in, for example, their
suppression of the indigenous peoples. Settler colonies illustrate the power of modes of
cultural representation to effect a stronger and more complete hegemony of the colonial
culture. In settler colony situations, resistance at the level of cultural practice may occur
before the political importance of such resistance is articulated or perceived.
2.6. Binarism
In the ordinary language 'binary' means a combination of two things, a pair, duality. This is a
widely used term with distinctive meanings in several fields and one that has had particular
sets of meanings in post-colonial theory.
24
The concern with binarism was first established by the French structural linguist, Ferdinand
de Saussure, who held that signs have meaning not by a simple reference to real objects, but
by their opposition to other signs. Each sign is itself the function of a binary between the
signifier, the 'signal' or sound image of the word, and the signified, the significance of the
signal, the concept or mental image that it evokes. Saussure held that although the connection
between the signifier and signified is arbitrary, once the link is established, it is fixed for
everyone who speaks that language.
While signs mean by their difference from other signs, the binary opposition is the most
extreme form of difference possible—sun/moon; man/woman; birth/death; black/white. Such
oppositions, each of which represents a binary system, are very common in the cultural
construction of reality. The problem with such binary systems is that they suppress ambiguous
or liminal spaces between the opposed categories, so that any overlapping region that may
appear, say, between the categories man/woman, child/adult or friend/alien, becomes
impossible according to binary logic, and a region of taboo in social experience.
Contemporary post-structuralist and feminist theories have demonstrated the extent to which
such binaries entail a violent hierarchy, in which one term of the opposition is always
dominant (man over woman, birth over death, white over black), and that, in fact, the binary
opposition itself exists to confirm that dominance. This means that any activity or state that
does not fit the binary opposition will become subject to repression or ritual. For instance, the
in-between (liminal) stage between child and adult—'youth'—is treated as a scandalous
category, a rite of passage subject to considerable suspicion and anxiety. Subsequently, the
state between the binarism, such as the binary colonizer/colonized, will evidence the signs of
extreme ambivalence manifested in mimicry, cultural schizophrenia, or various kinds of
obsession with identity, or will put energy into confirming one or other side of the binarism.
The binary logic of imperialism is a development of that tendency of Western thought in

general to see the world in terms of binary oppositions that establish a relation of dominance.
A simple distinction between centre/margin; colonizer/colonized; metropolis/empire;
civilized/primitive represents very efficiently the violent hierarchy on which imperialism is
based and which it actively perpetuates.
The binary constructs a scandalous category between the two terms that will be the domain of
taboo, but, equally importantly, the structure can be read downwards as well as across, so that
25
colonizer, white, human and beautiful are collectively opposed to colonized, black, bestial and
ugly. Clearly, the binary is very important in constructing ideological meanings in general,
and extremely useful in imperial ideology. The binary structure, with its various articulations
of the underlying binary, accommodates such fundamental binary impulses within
imperialism as the impulse to 'exploit' and the impulse to 'civilize'. Thus we may also find that
colonizer, civilized, teacher and doctor may be opposed to colonized, primitive, pupil and
patient. In fact, as we easily realize, the one depends on the other in a much more complex
way than this simplistic binary structure suggests, with the 'civilizing mission' of the former
categories acting as the curtain for the exploitation of those consigned to their binary
opposites, and the former category all too often acting to conceal and justify the latter, as
Conrad showed so convincingly in Heart of Darkness.
Perhaps one of the most catastrophic binary systems perpetuated by imperialism is the
invention of the concept of race. The reduction of complex physical and cultural differences
within colonized societies to the simple opposition of black/brown/yellow/white is in fact a
strategy to establish a binarism of white/non-white, which asserts a relation of dominance. By
thus ignoring the vast continuum of ethnic variation, relegating the whole region of ethnicity,
racial mixture and cultural specificity to one of taboo or otherness, imperialism draws the
concept of race into a simple binary that reflects its own logic of power. The danger for anti-
colonial resistance comes when the binary opposition is simply reversed, so that 'black', for
instance, or 'the colonized' become the dominant terms. This simply locks the project of
resistance into the semiotic opposition set up by imperial discourse.
Much contemporary post-colonial theory has been directed at breaking down various
kinds of binary separation in the analysis of colonialism and imperialism. For instance,
Guyanese novelist and critic Wilson Harris' attempt to break down the binary
structuration of language precedes the post-structuralists' efforts in European theory.
An important consequence of this disruption of imperial binary systems is a particular

emphasis on the interactive and dialectical effects of the colonial encounter. Imperial
binarisms always assume a movement in one direction—a movement from the colonizer to
the colonized, from the explorer to the explored, from the surveyor to the surveyed. But just
as post-colonial identity emerges in the ambivalent spaces of the colonial encounter, so the
dynamic of change is not all in one direction; it is in fact transcultural, with a significant
circulation of effects back and forth between the two, for the engagement with the colonies
26
became an increasingly important factor in the imperial society's constitution and
understanding of itself.
2.7. Theoretical Models of the World Order
A current metaphor used in postcolonial studies to describe the world of colonialism is that of
centre and margin (periphery).
This has been one of the most contentious ideas, and yet it is at the heart of any attempt at
defining what occurred in the representation and relationship of peoples as a result of the
colonial period. Colonialism could only exist at all by postulating that there existed a binary
opposition into which the world was divided. The gradual establishment of an empire
depended upon a stable hierarchical relationship in which the colonized existed as the other of
the colonizing culture. Thus the idea of the savage could occur only if there was a concept of
the civilized to oppose it. In this way a geography of difference was constructed, in which
differences were mapped and laid out in a metaphorical landscape that represented not
geographical fixity, but the fixity of power.
Imperial Europe became defined as the 'centre' in a geography at least as metaphysical as

physical. Everything that lay outside that centre was by definition at the margin or the
periphery of culture, power and civilization. The colonial mission, to bring the margin into the
sphere of influence of the enlightened centre, became the principal justification for the
economic and political exploitation of colonialism, especially after the middle of the
nineteenth century.
The idea is contentious because it has been supposed that attempts to define the centre/margin
model function to perpetuate it. In fact, post-colonial theorists have usually used the model to
suggest that dismantling such binaries does more than merely assert the independence of the
marginal, it also radically undermines the very idea of such a centre, deconstructing the
claims of the European colonizers to a unity and a fixity of a different order from that of
others.
27
2.8. Summary
Attempting to differentiate between African-American and postcolonial studies, this
unit stresses the importance of considering the concept of diaspora and the location.
The concepts of alterity and binarism are seen in their philosophic dimension as well
and especially the former is seen as essential in dealing with subjectivity.
Answer the following questions
- How does the concept of alterity relate to postcolonialism?
- What is the objective and area of investigation of African American studies?
- What are the ideological implications of anti-colonialism?
- How does binarism function in imperialistic thought?
- Explain the centre-margin metaphor.
28
UNIT THREE: Race, Ethnicity, Gender, Class
3.1. Introduction
Being considered as key concepts in dealing with human difference, these three
areas reveal different ideological attitudes that are rejected or embraced by
postcolonial studies. The essentialist positions are opposed and there is an attempt
to offer a voice to those subordinate categories that were historically silenced.
3.2. Competences
Students will be able to deal with this conceptual framework in an informed way
and perceive the changes of the terms in connection with historical and ideological
determinations. They will be able to speak about the history of these terms, about
the various components of ethnicity, to perceive the connection between feminism
and postcolonialism.
Study time for UNIT THREE: 3 hours
3. 3. Ethnicity
Ethnicity is a term that has been used increasingly since the 1960s to account for human
variation in terms of culture, tradition, language, social patterns and ancestry, rather than the
discredited generalizations of race with its assumption of a humanity divided into fixed,
genetically determined biological types. Ethnicity refers to the fusion of many traits that
belong to the nature of any ethnic group: shared values, beliefs, norms, tastes, behaviours,
experiences, consciousness of kind, and memories. A person’s ethnic group is such a
powerful identifier because while he or she chooses to remain in it, it is an identity that cannot
be denied, rejected or taken away by others. Whereas race emerged as a way of establishing a
hierarchical division between Europe and its 'others', identifying people according to fixed
genetic criteria, ethnicity is usually deployed as an expression of a positive self-perception
that offers certain advantages to its members. Membership of an ethnic group is shared
29
according to certain agreed criteria, even though the nature, the combination and the
importance of those criteria may be debated or may change over time.
There are many definitions of race and ethnicity. Researchers identified twenty-seven
definitions of ethnicity in the United States alone. This is possibly because ethnic groups,
although they may seem to be socially defined, are distinguished both from inside and outside
the group on the basis of cultural criteria, so that the defining characteristics of a particular
'ethnicity' have usually depended upon the various purposes for which the group has been
identified. Not every ethnic group will possess the totality of possible defining traits, but all
will display various combinations to varying degrees. Furthermore, both ethnicity and its
components are relative to time and place, and, like any social phenomenon, they are dynamic
and prone to change.
The simplest, and perhaps narrowest, definition of an ethnic group therefore might be
A group that is socially distinguished or set apart, by others and/or by itself,

primarily on the basis of cultural or national characteristics.
Indeed the word ethnic comes from the Greek ethnos, meaning 'nation'. In its earliest English
use the word 'ethnic' referred to culturally different 'heathen' nations, a sense that has lingered
as a connotation. Some contemporary uses of the term identify ethnicity with national groups
in Europe, where, with some exceptions, such as the Basques, the link between ethnicity and
nationality has appeared justified. The first use of ethnic group in terms of national origin
developed in the period of heavy migration from Southern and Eastern European nations to
the USA in the early twentieth century. The name by which an ethnic group understands itself
is still most often the name of an originating nation, whether that nation still exists or not (e.g.
Armenia). The term 'ethnicity' however, really only achieves wide currency when these
'national' groups find themselves as minorities within a larger national grouping, as occurs in
the aftermath of colonization, either through immigration to settled colonies such as USA,
Canada, Australia, New Zealand, or by the migration of colonized peoples to the colonizing
centre. One further consequence of this movement is that older European nations can no
longer claim to be coterminous with a particular ethnic group but are themselves the
heterogeneous and, in time, hybridized, mixture of immigrant groups.
30
A feature of the use of the term is that the element of marginalization evident in the earliest
uses of 'ethnic' often seems to remain implied in contemporary usage. Where it originally
referred to heathen nations, it now suggests groups that are not the mainstream, groups that
are not traditionally identified with the dominant national mythology. Thus in settler colonies
of the British Empire the dominant Anglo-Saxon group is usually not seen as an ethnic group
because its ethnicity has constructed the mythology of national identity. Such an identification
is not limited to colonial experience, but does reveal the 'imperialistic' nature of national
mythology, and the political implications of any link between ethnicity and nation.
Given the fact that 'ethnicity' comes into greatest contemporary currency in the context of
immigration, we might therefore further define ethnicity in its contemporary uses as “a group
or category of persons who have a common ancestral origin and the same cultural traits, who
have a sense of peoplehood and of group belonging, who are of immigrant background and
have either minority or majority status within a larger society”.
The perception of common ancestry, both real and mythical, has been important both to
outsiders' definitions and to ethnic groups' self-definitions. Max Weber saw ethnic groups
broadly as 'human groups that entertain a subjective belief in their common descent—because
of similarities of physical type or of customs or both, or because of memories of colonization
or migration—in such a way that this belief is important for the continuation of the non-
kinship communal relationships' (Max Weber 2003).
During the past decades there have been changes in the ways in which the term 'ethnicity' is
used: there are fewer ethnic groups in which religion has the greatest influence in the way its
members see its character; the concept of race—with some notable exceptions, such as
African–Americans—has become more and more distinct from ethnicity because of the
greater specificity of the latter (a 'racial' group may subsume several ethnic groups); in the
societies in which ethnicity is most discussed, the practical and social implications of the
group's status as an immigrant group have often outweighed memories of a common national
origin.
Recent studies have revealed that ethnic groups are not necessarily marginalized cultural
groups, but that all ethnic groupings, and indeed the concept of ethnicity itself, have come to
exert a powerful political function. Regardless of the status of the particular group, its
ethnicity is a key strategy in the furtherance of group political interests and political
31
advancement. Inasmuch as group power is always a favoured solution to individual
powerlessness, the ethnic group is a distinctive formation in the bid for political power within
a society. However, the impermeability of an ethnic group's borders, the difficulty of moving
in and out, of the group, along with its tendency to cut across class divisions, set it apart from
other political groupings such as trade unions and political parties and suggests that its
political nature is often largely unconscious. Nevertheless, the 'ethnic revolution', as Fishman
calls it, was a direct consequence of the use, from the 1960s, of cultural identity and the
assertion of ethnicity in political struggle.
To encompass the variety and complexity of social and cultural features constituting ethnicity,
more elaborate definitions have been developed, referring not only to a common ancestry and
consciousness, but also to symbolic elements that represent a sort of cultural focus, an
epitome of that ethnicity. These symbols have the function of providing a sense of ethnic
belonging. Examples of such symbolic elements are: kinship patterns, physical contiguity,
religious affiliation, language or dialect forms, tribal affiliation, nationality, physical features,
cultural values, and cultural practices such as art, literature and music. Various combinations
of these elements may be privileged at different times and places to provide a sense of
ethnicity.
This perspective of ethnicity accommodates the complex status of groups such as black
Americans or black British, whose identity may be constructed along racial as well as ethnic
lines. The 'ethnic revolution' of the 1960s saw the construction of various such new ethnicities
(ethnogenesis) which were much more consciously political in origin than other, increasingly
attenuated ethnic connections in contemporary society. Indeed, black ethnicity in America and
Britain becomes more intricately dependent upon politics in the process of ethnic legitimation
than is evident with white ethnic groups.
Ethnic identities thus persist beyond cultural assimilation into the wider society and the
persistence of ethnic identity is not necessarily related to the perpetuation of traditional
cultures. In most cases, a very few features of traditional culture need to be selected as
'symbolic elements' around which ethnic identity revolves, and individuals need experience
very few of the defining criteria (e.g. common ancestry) to consider themselves members of
the group. No ethnic group is completely unified or in complete agreement about its own
ethnicity and no one essential feature can ever be found in every member of the group.
Nevertheless, this dynamic interweaving of identifying features has come to function as an
32
increasingly potent locus of identity in an increasingly migratory, globalized and hybridized
world.
3.4. Race
'Race' is a term for the classification of human beings into physically, biologically and
genetically distinct groups. The notion of race assumes, firstly, that humanity is divided into
unchanging natural types, recognizable by physical features that are transmitted 'through the
blood' and permit distinctions to be made between 'pure' and 'mixed' races. Furthermore, the
term implies that the mental and moral behaviour of human beings, as well as individual
personality, ideas and capacities, can be related to racial origin, and that knowledge of that
origin provides a satisfactory account of the behaviour.
Race is particularly pertinent to the rise of colonialism, because the division of human society
in this way is inextricable from the need of colonialist powers to establish a dominance over
subject peoples and hence justify the imperial enterprise. Race thinking and colonialism are
imbued with the same impetus to draw a binary distinction between 'civilized' and 'primitive'
and the same necessity for the hierarchic division of human types. By translating the fact of
colonial oppression into a justifying theory, European race thinking initiated a hierarchy of
human types that has been dominant for a long time. Although race is not specifically an
invention of imperialism, it quickly became one of imperialism's most supportive ideas,
because the idea of superiority that generated the emergence of race as a concept adapted
easily to both impulses of the imperial mission: dominance and enlightenment.
In this respect, 'racism' is not so much a product of the concept of race as the very reason for
its existence. Without the underlying desire for hierarchical categorization implicit in racism,
'race' would not exist. Racism can be defined as: a way of thinking that considers a group’s
unchangeable physical characteristics to be linked in a direct, causal way to psychological or
intellectual characteristics, and which on this basis distinguishes between 'superior' and
'inferior' racial groups. Physical differences did not always represent an inferiority of culture
or even a radical difference in shared human characteristics. In the period of the Crusades, the
racial difference of black African Coptic saint-warrior St Maurice is clearly recorded without
prejudice in a statue in Magdeburg Cathedral which shows him to be a black African, even
including his facial lineage cuts. But with the rise of European imperialism and the growth of
Orientalism in the nineteenth century, the need to establish such a distinction between
33
superior and inferior finds its most 'scientific' confirmation in the dubious analysis and
taxonomy of racial characteristics.
'Race' is first used in the English language in 1508 in a poem by William Dunbar, and through
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it remained essentially a literary word denoting a
class of persons or things. It was only in the late eighteenth century that the term came to
mean a distinct category of human beings with physical characteristics transmitted by descent.
Humans had been categorized by Europeans on physical grounds from the late 1600s, when
François Bernier postulated a number of distinctive categories, based largely on facial
character and skin colour. Soon a hierarchy of groups (not yet termed races) came to be
accepted, with white Europeans at the top. The Negro or black African category was usually
relegated to the bottom, in part because of black Africans' colour and allegedly 'primitive'
culture, but primarily because they were best known to Europeans as slaves.
Immanuel Kant's use of the German phrase for 'races of mankind' in his Observations on the
Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764) was probably the first explicit use of the term in
the sense of biologically or physically distinctive categories of human beings. Debates about
whether human variation was caused by descent or environment raged throughout the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But with the ascendancy of the biological sciences in
the late nineteenth century, descent emerged as the predominant model. It was encapsulated in
the transition of 'race' from signifying a line of descent that defined a group by historical
continuity, to its scientific sense of 'race' as a zoologically or biologically defined group.
Despite its allegedly scientific grounding and application, the term 'race' has always provided
an effective means of establishing the simplest model of human variation—colour difference.
Colour became the means of distinguishing between groups of people and of identifying the
behaviour to be expected of them. In 1805, the French anatomist Cuvier, who was particularly
significant in the development of 'race' theory, postulated the existence of three major 'races':
the white, the yellow and the black. The division of the whole of humanity into three such
arbitrarily designated genetic groups seems so vague as to be entirely useless for any kind of
analysis, but the concept has remained influential for the ideological reason that this typology
rested upon a gradation from superior to inferior. The assumptions underlying this racial
typology, though continually contradicted by actual observation, have remained stubbornly
persistent to the present day, even when the categories are more elaborately defined as
'caucasoid', 'mongoloid' and 'negroid'. These assumptions are: firstly, that variations in the
34
constitution and behaviour of individuals were to be explained as the expression of different
biological types; secondly, that differences between these types explained variations in human
cultures; thirdly, that the distinctive nature of the types explained the superiority of Europeans
and Aryans in particular; and fourthly, that the friction between nations and individuals of
different type emerged from innate characteristics.
The simple clarity of this view of race more or less based on colour was superseded by the
implications of Darwin's The Origin of Species (1859). Natural selection now offered a
mechanism for species alteration—either the superior races might be contaminated through
contact with the inferior, or deliberate human intervention might maximize the benefits of
selection and advance the emergence of pure races. In either case, the fundamental
assumption of the hierarchy of races remained secure. Darwin's contribution was to provide
the theory of race with a mechanism of change in the idea of natural selection, and
consequently to offer the possibility for planned racial development (eugenics)—a central
tenet of the school of thought that came to be known as Social Darwinism.
Social Darwinism, in both its positive and negative implications, concurred readily with
imperial practice, particularly the paradoxical dualism that existed in imperialist thought
between the debasement and the idealization of colonized subjects. On the one hand, the
debasement of the primitive peoples could find in Social Darwinism a justification for the
domination and at times extinction of inferior races as not only an inevitable but a desirable
unfolding of natural law. On the other hand, the concept of racial improvement concurred
with the 'civilizing mission' of imperial ideology, which encouraged colonial powers to take
up the 'white man's burden' and raise up the condition of the inferior races who were idealized
as child-like and malleable. The assumption of superiority thus supported by scientific racial
theory could pursue its project of world domination with impunity.
3.5. Franz Fanon’s Contribution
One of the first theorists of postcolonialism and of negritude, Franz Fanon, a doctor of
Algerian origin and a black himself, was confronted with the black psyche when taking care
of war prisoners in Africa during the civil war. The result of his medical experience and
political activity is reflected in the two major books, Black Skin White Mask and The
Wretched of the Earth mentioned in Unit One.
35
In his epoch making work Black Skin White Mask, Fanon investigates the position of the
black person in the Eurocentric world and the various implications of racial attitudes and
treatment. He suggests that the “black is not a man… There is a zone of non-being, a sterile
and arid region, an utterly naked declivity where an authentic upheaval can be born”.
The first step to be taken, Fanon says, is to liberate the black man from himself: “Uprooted,
pursued, baffled, doomed to watch the dissolution of the truths that he has worked out for
himself one after another, he has to give up projecting onto the world an antimony that
coexists with him” (p.8). Just like the white man thinks himself superior to the black, the
black man desires to be white, to prove, at all costs, “the equal value of their intellect”. “For
the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white”. (Fanon 2008:10).
The analysis begins in a manner similar to Freud’s famous assertion “What does woman
want?”, by asking “What does the black man want?” . Indeed it uses a mixture of Freudian
psychoanalysis and Jungian analytical psychology in order to analyze the psyche of the
Antillean negro. But the attempt is not entirely Freudian due to the limited applicability of this
schema to the effects of racism on the negro psyche. Yet Fanon uses an essentially Jungian
argument that, given the unfortunate historical conflation in European civilization of evil with
the color black, the negro came to be tragically equated in the collective unconscious of
Europe with the absence of Good and Beauty. Both the Jew and the negro “stand for evil. The
black man more so, for the good reason that he is black. Is not whiteness in symbols always
ascribed to …Justice, Truth, Virginity?... His body is black, his language is black, his soul
must be black too… The black man is the symbol of Evil and Ugliness” (p.180)
There are many examples of how the black man is a symbol of Evil in the Western thought:
Satan is black, when one is dirty one is black – meaning either physical or moral dirtiness.
The negro is also the symbol of sin, of the lower emotions and inclinations, of the dark side of
the soul, of death, war, famine. “All birds of prey are black”. Fanon argues that the source of
this color symbolism and the negative stereotyping of the negro lies within the psyche of the
white person for which the negro plays the role of the shadow, the part of our personality that
must be repudiated. As a result, “European culture has an imago of the negro which is
responsible for all the conflicts that may arise.” (p.169). Thus the negro is the antithetical
physical incarnation of everything which whiteness stands for.
36
After this general consideration of white racism and its history, Fanon shows how this racism
is internalized by the negro to his own detriment, resulting in a sort of psychic division. The
psyche of the negro is necessarily shaped by the Eurocentric world in which he lives and is
educated. The impositions of the culture in which he lives, make the negro adopt the same
distrust toward blackness as that nourished by the whites. “Through the collective
unconscious the Antillean has taken over all the archetypes belonging to the European… I am
a white man. For unconsciously I distrust what is black in me, that is, the whole of my being
(p.191).
Thus the negative archetypes of blackness in the collective unconscious are assimilated by
cultural indoctrination: “I read white books and little by little I take into myself the prejudices,
the myths, the folklore that have come to me from Europe” (p.192). Thus the negro comes to
bear the burden of “the original sin” and “after having been the slave of the white man, he
enslaves himself” (p.192). The result is that the negro lives and ambiguity that is
“extraordinarily neurotic” and which Fanon considers to be the source of Negrophilia in the
Antillean. The ultimate consequence is that irreconcilable self-division suggested by the title
of the book, namely the rejection of all that is black and the embrace of all things white.
“Moral consciousness implies a kind of scission, a fracture of consciousness into a
bright part and an opposing black part. In order to achieve morality, it is essential that
the black, the dark, the Negro vanish from consciousness. Hence the Negro is forever
in combat with his own image (p.194).
The negro’s unconscious is taught to despise himself, his own biological being and his
heritage. At war with his own self, the negro learns to repress his blackness in order to
identify with everything white, at a huge cost to himself.
3.6. Feminism and Postcolonialism
Feminism is of crucial interest to postcolonial discourse for two major reasons. Firstly, both
patriarchy and imperialism can be seen to exert analogous forms of domination over those
they render subordinate. Hence the experiences of women in patriarchy and those of
colonized subjects can be paralleled in a number of respects, and both feminist and post-
colonial politics oppose such dominance. Secondly, there have been vigorous debates in a
37
number of colonized societies over whether gender or colonial oppression is the more
important political factor in women's lives. This has sometimes led to division between
Western feminists and political activists from impoverished and oppressed countries; or,
alternatively, the two are inextricably entwined, in which case the condition of colonial
dominance affects, in material ways, the position of women within their societies. This has led
to calls for a greater consideration of the construction and employment of gender in the
practices of imperialism and colonialism.
Feminism, like postcolonialism, has often been concerned with the ways and extent to which
representation and language are crucial to identity formation and to the construction of
subjectivity. For both groups, language has been a vehicle for subverting patriarchal and
imperial power, and both discourses have invoked essentialist arguments in positing more
authentic forms of language against those imposed on them. Both discourses share a sense of
disarticulation from an inherited language and have thus attempted to recover a linguistic
authenticity via a pre-colonial language or a primal feminine tongue. However, both feminists
and colonized peoples, like other subordinate groups, have also used appropriation to subvert
and adapt dominant languages and signifying practices.
The texts of feminist theory and those of post-colonialism concur on many aspects of the
theory of identity, of difference and of the interpellation of the subject by a dominant
discourse, as well as offering to each other various strategies of resistance to such controls.
Similarities between 'writing the body' in feminism and 'writing place' in post-colonialism;
similarities between the strategies of bisexuality and cultural syncreticity; and similar appeals
to nationalism may be detected (Ashcroft 1989).
In the 1980s, many feminist critics began to argue that Western feminism, which had assumed
that gender overrode cultural differences to create a universal category of the womanly or the
feminine, was operating from hidden, universalist assumptions with a middle-class, Euro-
centric bias. Feminism was therefore charged with failing to account for or deal adequately
with the experiences of Third World women. In this respect, the issues concerning gender
face similar problems to those concerned with class. Mohanty, for instance, criticizes
the assumption that all of us of the same gender, across classes and cultures,
are somehow socially constituted as a homogeneous group identified prior to
the process of analysis…. Thus, the discursively consensual homogeneity of
38
'women' as a group is mistaken for the historically specific material reality of
groups of women. (Mohanty 2006:338)
Domatila Barrios de Chungara's Let Me Speak demonstrates how the material reality of
different groups of women can lead to very different perceptions of the nature of political
struggle. When she was invited to the International Women's Year Tribunal in Mexico City in
1974, the difference between the feminist agenda of the tribunal and her own political struggle
against oppression in the Bolivian tin mines became very clear. In her view, the meeting's
World Plan of Action 'didn't touch on the problems that are basic for Latin American women'.
The overlap between patriarchal, economic and racial oppression has always been difficult to
negotiate, and the differences between the political priorities of First and Third World women
have persisted to the present. Such differences appear to be those of emphasis and strategy
rather than those of principle, since the interconnection of various forms of social oppression
materially affects the lives of all women.
More recently, feminism has been concerned that categories like gender may sometimes be
ignored within the larger formation of the colonial, and that post-colonial theory has tended to
elide gender differences in constructing a single category of the colonized. These critics argue
that colonialism operated very differently for women and for men, and the 'double
colonization' that resulted when women were subject both to general discrimination as
colonial subjects and specific discrimination as women needs to be taken into account in any
analysis of colonial oppression (Spivak 1988). Even post-independence practices of anti-
colonial nationalism are not free from this kind of gender bias, and constructions of the
traditional or pre-colonial are often heavily inflected by a contemporary masculinist bias that
falsely represents 'native' women as quietist and subordinate.
One illuminating account of the connections between race and gender as a consequence of
imperial expansion is Sander L.Gilman's 'Black bodies, white bodies' (in Gilman 1990), which
shows how the representation of the African in nineteenth-century European art, medicine and
literature, reinforced the construction of the sexualized female body. The presence of male or
female black servants was regularly included in paintings, plays and operas as a sign of illicit
sexual activity. 'By the nineteenth century the sexuality of the black, both male and female,
becomes an icon for deviant sexuality in general' (Gilman 1990:228). Furthermore, the
'relationship between the sexuality of the black woman and that of the sexualized white
woman enters a new dimension when contemporary scientific discourse concerning the nature
39
of black female sexuality is examined' (Gilman 1990:231). Notorious examples of prurient
exoticism, such as the Hottentot Venus displayed on tour in England, provide material
examples of the ways in which signs of racial otherness became instrumental in the
construction of a (transgressive) female sexuality.
In settler colonies, although women's bodies were not directly constructed as part of a
transgressive sexuality, their bodies were frequently the site of a power discourse of a
different kind. As critics like Whitlock have argued, they were perceived reductively not as
sexual but as reproductive subjects, as literal 'wombs of empire' whose function was limited to
the population of the new colonies with white settlers.
3.7. Class and Postcolonialism
Like 'gender' and race, the concept of class intersects in important ways with the cultural
implications of colonial domination. It is clear that economic control was of primary
importance in imperialism, and that economic control involved a reconstruction of the
economic and social resources of colonized societies. Consequently, class was an important
factor in colonialism, firstly in constructing the attitudes of the colonizers towards different
groups and categories of the colonized (natives), and increasingly amongst the colonized
peoples themselves as they began to employ colonial cultural discourse to describe the
changing nature of their own societies. However, it is less clear to what degree categories like
class (which is a very Eurocentric notion), can be employed as descriptors of colonized
societies without profound modifications imposed by their cultural differences from Europe.
With all its bias, the idea of a binarism between a proletarian and an owning class was a
model for the centre's perception and treatment of the margin, and a model for the way in
which imperial authority exercised its power within the colonies.
Ideas of class and race were deeply intertwined in nineteenth-century European thought, with
figures like Gobineau, sometimes called 'the father of modern racism', motivated in his
production of a theory of race and degeneration by his own aristocratic fear of the degeneracy
produced by the emerging power of the new urban bourgeoisie. The legitimization of
sociopolitical (class group) interests by appeals to racial origins was a strong feature of
nineteenth-century French thought, as myths of origin, Germanic and Gallic, were employed
to legitimate different positions in the class struggles of the time. A similar association can be
found in much nineteenth-century English thought, with appeals by literary texts to ideas of
40
Norman and Saxon blood as features of a similar debate between the aristocracy and the new
bourgeoisie.
The concentration of manufacturing in England and the use of colonies as sources of raw
materials meant that colonial societies exercised no control over the 'means of production'. At
the same time, a modern class analysis involves more than simply identifying the owners of
the means of production and the wage-slaves of classic Marxism. It involves identifying the
specific and complex array of class interests and affiliations that are established in the wake of
capital investment in the colonies. It also involves an analysis of the ways in which the
colonized themselves replicate the forms of the capitalist system, with the emergence of
distinctive forms of 'native' capitalists and workers whose social role will often be the result
of an intersection of their place in the new social and economic structures with their own,
older social and economic formations.
The question of class in colonial societies is further complicated by the kinds of cultural
particularities that intersect with general economic categories. For example, any analysis of
ideas of 'class' in societies such as India, in which traditional caste divisions may be overlaid
by modern, post-industrial forces, needs to take into account the ways in which models of
class-divided groups, such as workers or capitalists, often cross with the older caste
boundaries. Where these identities and differences coincide, they may reinforce the kinds of
privileges or oppressions that a classic Marxist class analysis would emphasize. Even those
settler societies, such as Australia, that would seem to reproduce the existing class structure of
Britain more exactly than any other kind of colony, clearly do not do so in a completely
identical way. Thus, though they may reproduce many aspects of the imperial centre, they
often construct opposing myths of their democratic or classless nature, or operate along lines
of internal division based on perceived racial or religious differences ('Irish Catholic
convictism' for example) that have completely different orientations from that of the officially
acknowledged 'Mother Country'. Such myths of egalitarianism or democracy clearly do not
reflect economic truths since inequalities of wealth prevail in all these colonial situations, but
they may well reflect self-perceptions that are important aspects of the construction of a new
national mythology and identity.
Since post-colonial theory has tended to concentrate on the issues of race, ethnicity, and
gender in the colonialist definitions and opposing self-definitions of colonized peoples, the
importance of class has been downplayed. It is necessary therefore to focus on this aspect as
41
well as the means of representation and the means of production act together to create the
complex conditions of the various colonial and post-colonial societies.
3.8. Summary
The issues of race, ethnicity, gender are very differently viewed in the history of
Western thought and become crucial categories in any study of postcolonialism.
This unit deals with the three aspects of (post)colonial discourse that were subjects
of contention for many ideological positions and used as powerful identifiers and
arguments for hierarchical division. Various determinations of ethnicity and race are
considered and some changes in their uses. Gender identity as well as class
determinations are also briefly considered in relation with colonialism.
- Give a definition of ethnicity and refer to its components

- Relate the concept of race to colonialism
- Draw a brief history of the term (race).
- What was Fanon’s contribution to the understanding of race and racism?
- What is the connection between feminism and postcolonial discourse?
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Mid-term Assignment
Read the following article and analyse the concept of Eurocentrism:
Sites of Indeterminacy and the Spectres of Eurocentrism

Gerhard Richter
What is proper to a culture is to not be identical to itself. Not to not have an identity, but not
to be able to identify itself, to be able to say `me’ or `we’. (Jacques Derrida [1992] The Other
Heading)
Of all the concepts that have been put into circulation in current discussions about the
possibilities of a new politics of ethnic, racial, cultural, and national identity, perhaps none
will have been more perplexing or intensely contested than the concept of Èurope’. With the
various acts and political plans for European unification, of which the currency union is only
the most visible, the terms and theories of what it might mean to think of a new Europe have
moved to the forefront of debates surrounding the politics of postmodernism, the movements
of late capitalism, and even the so-called New World Order itself, once thought to be a
distinctly American invention of the Reagan-Bush era. This `new’ Europe is less a radical
transformation into something that never was than a strategic activation of an òld’ Europe
and the possibilities and promises that were always associated with it but never fully realised.
In this chiastic temporality and its logic of the supplement, the old Europe, as a promise, will
only have become itself after the fact and as something else, that is, as the Europe to come.
What is at stake in considering such a new, united Europe touches upon many of today’s most
pressing cultural and political questions. These include the respective status of the insider and
the outsider; concerns about nationalisms and borders; the shifting contours of the possibility
of community; the ethical dilemma of having to decide whether to invite or to reject the
unknown guest who suddenly arrives, whether in juridico-philosophical terms or as a practical
matter of asylum and immigration policies; the levelling effects of global cultural
appropriation; the politics of language and representation; and issues of social justice as they
pertain to the spectres of Eurocentrism.
Apart from appropriations of Èurope’ by various movements of the New Right in France and
elsewhere, which believe they have found in the concept an unlikely source of nourishment
43
for their nationalistic delusions, it appears that from the many competing left-liberal
discourses of what a concept of Europe might designate at the beginning of the millennium,
two main positions emerge. On the one hand, some favour a strong united Europe because
they identify it with a tradition of solidarity, peace, freedom, tolerance, and democracy. This
tradition, in its modern form, reaches back to the cosmopolitanism of Kant and the influential
texts of other eighteenth century German writers such as Herder, Novalis and Friedrich
Schlegel. In France, the tradition extends back to Rousseau, Diderot and Saint-Pierre, and in
England to Locke, Hume and Bentham.1 It is now claimed, rightly or wrongly, mainly by the
proponents of liberal democracy and its theorists, such as J Èurgen Habermas and Charles
Taylor. On the other hand, critics of Eurocentrism recognise in it nothing but the latest
iteration of a specifically Western colonialism, which masks its problematic claims to self-
identity, superior community, and racial and cultural hegemony in the familiar cloak of
humanistic concepts that have outlived their usefulness. The un-dialectical appropriations of
Enlightenment ideals, they argue, have been exposed as questionable constructions by what
Jean-François Lyotard and others call the postmodern mistrust of master narratives. For these
writers, the concept of Europe today cannot be thought in separation from its dark underbelly:
from the way in which its own logic cannot be fully accounted for by the very ideals that it
posits on the surface.
44
UNIT FOUR: The Globalized World
4.1. Introduction
This unit will focus on the complex phenomenon of globalization from the
perspective of postcolonial studies, stressing its connections with and origins in
imperialism, its ideologies and practices. The simple argument in favour of this
perspective is the fact that the forces of globalization are still centred in the West.
Issues of diaspora, hybridity and cultural diversity arise in the context of
globalization and they acquire a great importance in defining various identities.
4.2. Competences
This unit enables students to discuss issues of globalization in connection with
certain ideologies, such as cultural essentialism, Postnationalism and cultural
diversity, or with identity issues such as diaspora, hybridity and cultural
difference. New key terms are thus clarified and acquired.
Study time for UNIT FOUR: 2 hours
4.3. Defining Globalization
Globalization is the process whereby individual lives and local communities are affected by
economic and cultural forces that operate world-wide. It is the process of the world becoming
a single place. Globalism is the perception of the world as a function or result of the processes
of globalization upon local communities.
Before the emergence of the concept in the mid-80s, other terms such as 'international' and
'international relations' were preferred. The rise of the word 'international' itself in the
eighteenth century indicated the growing importance of territorial states in organizing social
relations, and is an early consequence of the global perspective of European imperialism.
Similarly, the rapidly increasing interest in globalization reflects a changing organization of
45
world-wide social relations in the twentieth century, one in which the 'nation' has begun to
have a decreasing importance as individuals and communities gain access to globally
disseminated knowledge and culture, and are affected by economic realities that bypass the
boundaries of the state. The structural aspects of globalization are the global economy, the
global communication system and world military order.
Part of the complexity of globalism comes from the different ways in which globalization is
approached. Some analysts embrace it enthusiastically as a positive feature of a changing
world in which access to technology, information, services and markets will be of benefit to
local communities, where dominant forms of social organization will lead to universal
prosperity, peace and freedom, and in which a perception of a global environment will lead to
global ecological concern.
Others reject it as a form of domination by 'First World' countries over 'Third World' ones, in
which individual distinctions of culture and society are erased by an increasingly
homogeneous global culture, and local economies are more firmly incorporated into a system
of global capital. For this group, globalism 'is a teleological doctrine which provides, explains
and justifies an interlocking system of world trade'.
The chief argument against globalization is that global culture and global economy did not
just spontaneously erupt but originated in the centres of capitalist power. At the sane time
globalization does not impact in the same way, to the same degree, or equally beneficially
upon different communities.
Proponents of 'critical globalism' take a neutral view of the process, simply examining its
processes and effects. Thus, while critical globalists see that globalization 'has often
perpetuated poverty, widened material inequalities, increased ecological degradation,
sustained militarism, fragmented communities, marginalized subordinated groups, fed
intolerance and deepened crises of democracy', they also see that it has had a positive effect in
'trebling world per capita income since 1945, halving the proportion of the world living in
abject poverty, increasing ecological consciousness, and possibly facilitating disarmament,
while various subordinated groups have grasped opportunities for global organisation'
(Scholte 1996:53).
46
As a field of study, globalization covers such disciplines as international relations, political
geography, economics, sociology, communication studies, ecological and cultural studies. It
addresses the decreasing agency though not the status of the nation-state in the world political
order and the increasing influence of structures and movements of corporate capital.
Globalization can also be 'a signifier of travel, of transnational company operations, of the
changing pattern of world employment, or global environmental risk'. Indeed, there are
compelling reasons for thinking globally where the environment is concerned.
The importance of globalization to postcolonial studies comes firstly from its demonstration
of the structure of world power relations which stands firm in the twentieth century as a
legacy of Western imperialism. Secondly, the ways in which local communities engage the
forces of globalization bear some resemblance to the ways in which colonized societies have
historically engaged and appropriated the forces of imperial dominance. In some respects,
globalization, in the period of rapid decolonization after the Second World War, demonstrates
the transmutation of imperialism into the supra-national operations of economics,
communications and culture. This does not mean that globalization is a simple, unidirectional
movement from the powerful to the weak, from the central to the peripheral, because
globalism is transcultural in the same way that imperialism itself has been. But it does
demonstrate that globalization did not simply erupt spontaneously around the world, but has a
history embedded in the history of imperialism, in the structure of the world system, and in
the origins of a global economy within the ideology of imperial rhetoric.
The key to the link between classical imperialism and contemporary globalization in the
twentieth century has been the role of the United States. Despite its resolute refusal to
perceive itself as 'imperial', and its public stance against the older European doctrines of
colonialism, the United States had eagerly espoused the political domination and economic
and cultural control associated with imperialism. More importantly, United States society
during and after this early expansionist phase initiated those features of social life and social
relations that today may be considered to characterize the global: mass production, mass
communication and mass consumption. During the twentieth century, these have spread
transnationally due to the increasingly integrated resources of the global economy.
Despite the balance between its good and bad effects, identified by critical globalists,
globalization has not been a politically neutral activity. While access to global forms of
communication, markets and culture may indeed be world-wide today, it has been argued by
47
some critics that if one asks how that access is enabled and by what ideological machinery it
is advanced, it can be seen that the operation of globalization cannot be separated from the
structures of power perpetuated by European imperialism. Global culture is a continuation of
an imperial dynamic of influence, control, dissemination and hegemony that operates
according to an already initiated structure of power that emerged in the sixteenth century in
the great confluence of imperialism, capitalism and modernity. This explains why the forces
of globalization are still, in some senses, centred in the West (in terms of power and
institutional organization), despite their global dissemination.
4.4. Globalization, Hybridity, Diaspora
Although national consciousness has many benefits, according to Franz Fanon it also has its
pitfalls. Foremost among these are uncritical assertions and constructions of cultural
essentialism and distinctiveness. Fanon is aware of the dangers of cultural essentialism, the
fixity and fetishism of identities within the calcification of colonial culture, of how colonial
rationality can become imbued with racism and violent logic.
Obviously, the nationalist work of psychological and cultural rehabilitation is a crucial phase
in the liberation of a people consigned, as Fanon puts it, to barbarism, degradation and
bestiality by the harsh rhetoric of the colonial civilizing mission. Nonetheless, aggressive
assertions of cultural identity frequently come in the way of wider international solidarities. In
Fanon's understanding, the claims of these larger and more expansive solidarities are finally
more compelling than those of national culture. Ideally, national consciousness ought to pave
the way for the emergence of an ethically and politically enlightened global community.
On a similar note, Stuart Hall, among others, warns that the assertions of dissident
'culturalisms' should, at best, be regarded as a necessary fiction or, as a form of 'strategic
essentialism', relevant only to the particular situation of the colonial encounter. After
colonialism, it is imperative to imagine a new transformation of social consciousness which
exceeds the rigid boundaries invoked by national consciousness. Postcolonialism, in other
words, ought to facilitate the emergence of what we might, after Said, call an enlightened
'postnationalism'. Nativism, as Said writes, 'is not the only alternative. There is the possibility
of a more generous and pluralistic vision of the world' ( Said 1993: 277).
48
The vast majority of postcolonial critics and theorists seem to agree that the discourse
surrounding 'postnationalism' offers a more satisfactory reading of the colonial experience
and, simultaneously, the most visionary blueprint for a postcolonial future. It is often argued
that the perspective offered by anti-colonial nationalism restricts the colonial encounter to an
opposition between repression, on the one hand, and retaliation, on the other. Nevertheless,
far from being exclusively oppositional, the encounter with colonial power occurred along a
variety of ambivalent registers.
Postnationalism pursues such ambivalent aspects in the colonial encounter in order to bridge
the old divide between Westerner and native through a less embittered account of colonialism
as a cooperative venture. It is concerned with the fulfilment of two principal objectives. First,
it seeks to show how the colonial encounter contributed to the mutual transformation of
colonizer and colonized. In other words, the old story of clash and confrontation is retold from
the perspective of the transcultural aspect of colonialism. Second, this gentler re-telling of the
colonial past produces a utopian manifesto for a postcolonial ethic, devoted to the task of
imagining a global alliance against institutionalized suffering and oppression. Fanon’s
Wretched of the Earth concludes with a strikingly similar vision for postcolonial futurity: 'The
human condition, plans for mankind and collaboration between men in those tasks which
increase the sum total of humanity are new problems, which demand true inventions'.
Generally speaking, there seem to be three conditions which have prepared contemporary
postcolonial thought for this discursive turn toward postnationalism. First, a growing body of
academic work on globalization insists that in the face of the economic and electronic
homogenization of the globe, national boundaries are redundant or, at least, no longer
sustainable in the contemporary world. The random flow of global capital is accompanied by
an unprecedented movement of peoples, technologies and information across previously
impermeable borders, from one location to another. This McDonaldization of the world
demands postcolonial attention, for in some sense, colonialism was the historical harbinger of
the fluid global circuits which now characterize modernity. In her reading of imperial travel
narratives, Mary Louise Pratt draws attention to the fact that colonial Eurocentrism was
engendered by a peculiarly 'planetary consciousness', which produced a 'picture of the planet
appropriated and redeployed from a unified European perspective' ( Pratt 1992: 36). The
imperial gaze, in other words, delivered a distinctively globalized perception of the disparate
world. In addition, the colonial encounter itself accelerated the contact between previously
49
discrete and autonomous cultures. Imperialism enforced a necessary contiguity or overlap
between diverse and mutually antagonistic national histories. After colonialism, the
independence of India marked a crucial event in the histories of both modern India and
modern Britain. The experience of empire, Said writes, 'is a common one'. Accordingly, the
condition of the postcolonial aftermath pertains 'to Indians and British, Algerians and French,
Westerners and Africans'. Postcoloniality, one might say, is just another name for the
globalization of cultures and histories.
4.5. Other/ Otherness
In general terms, the 'other' is anyone who is separate from one's self. The existence of others
is crucial in defining what is 'normal' and in locating one's own place in the world. The
colonized subject is characterized as 'other' through discourses such as primitivism and
cannibalism, as a means of establishing the binary separation of the colonizer and colonized
and asserting the naturalness and primacy of the colonizing culture and world view.
Although the term is used extensively in existential philosophy, notably by Sartre in Being
and Nothingness to define the relations between Self and Other in creating self-awareness and
ideas of identity, the definition of the term as used in current post-colonial theory is rooted in
the Freudian and post-Freudian analysis of the formation of subjectivity, most notably in the
work of the psychoanalyst and cultural theorist Jacques Lacan. Lacan's use of the term
involves a distinction between the 'Other' and the 'other', which can lead to some confusion,
but it is a distinction that can be very useful in post-colonial theory.
In Lacan's theory, the other—with the small 'o'—designates the other who resembles the self,
which the child discovers when it looks in the mirror and becomes aware of itself as a
separate being. When the child sees its image in the mirror, that image must bear sufficient
resemblance to the child to be recognized, but it must also be separate enough to ground the
child's hope for an 'anticipated mastery'; this fiction of mastery will become the basis of the
ego. This other is important in defining the identity of the subject. In post-colonial theory, it
can refer to the colonized others who are marginalized by imperial discourse, identified by
their difference from the centre and, perhaps crucially, become the focus of anticipated
mastery by the imperial 'ego'.
50
The Other—with the capital 'O'—has been called the grande-autre by Lacan, the great Other,
in whose gaze the subject gains identity. The Symbolic Other is not a real interlocutor but can
be embodied in other subjects such as the mother or father that may represent it. The
Symbolic Other is a 'transcendent or absolute pole of address, summoned each time that
subject speaks to another subject'. Thus the Other can refer to the mother whose separation
from the subject locates her as the first focus of desire; it can refer to the father whose
Otherness locates the subject in the Symbolic order; it can refer to the unconscious itself
because the unconscious is structured like a language that is separate from the language of
the subject. Fundamentally, the Other is crucial to the subject because the subject exists in its
gaze. Lacan says that 'all desire is the metonym of the desire to be’ because the first desire of
the subject is the desire to exist in the gaze of the Other.
This Other can be compared to the imperial centre, imperial discourse, or the empire itself, in
two ways: firstly, it provides the terms in which the colonized subject gains a sense of his or
her identity as somehow 'other', dependent; secondly, it becomes the 'absolute pole of
address', the ideological framework in which the colonized subject may come to understand
the world. In colonial discourse, the subjectivity of the colonized is continually located in the
gaze of the imperial Other, the 'grand-autre'. Subjects may be approached by the ideology of
the maternal and nurturing function of the colonizing power, concurring with descriptions
such as 'mother England' and 'Home'.
On the other hand, the Symbolic Other may be represented in the Father. The significance and
enforced dominance of the imperial language into which colonial subjects are inducted may
give them a clear sense of power being located in the colonizer, a situation corresponding
metaphorically to the subject's entrance into the Symbolic order and the discovery of the Law
of the Father. The ambivalence of colonial discourse lies in the fact that both these processes
of 'othering' occur at the same time, the colonial subject being both a 'child' of empire and a
primitive and degraded subject of imperial discourse. The construction of the dominant
imperial Other occurs in the same process by which the colonial others come into being.
51
4.6. Cultural Diversity/ Cultural Difference
In common usage, these terms both refer interchangeably to the variety of cultures and the
need to acknowledge this variety to avoid universal prescriptive cultural definitions. However,
Homi Bhabha, in the essay 'The commitment to theory' (Bhabha 1994), employs the terms as
oppositions to draw a distinction between two ways of representing culture. Bhabha argues
that it is insufficient to record signifiers of cultural diversity which merely acknowledge a
range of separate and distinct systems of behaviour, attitudes and values. Such a framework
may even continue to suggest that such differences are merely aberrant or exotic, as was
implicit in imperialistic ethnographies.
Cultural difference suggests that cultural authority resides not in a series of fixed and
determined diverse objects but in the process of how these objects come to be known and so
come into being. This process of coming to be known is what brings into being and
discriminates between the various statements of culture. By stressing the process by which we
know and can know cultures as totalities, the term 'cultural difference' emphasizes our
awareness of the 'homogenizing effects of cultural symbols and icons'.
The 'difference' Bhabha emphasizes here is clearly connected with the radical ambivalence
that he argues is implicit in all colonial discourse. He insists that this same ambivalence is
implicit in the act of cultural interpretation itself since, as he puts it, the production of
meaning in the relations of two systems requires a 'Third Space'. This space is something like
the idea of deferral in post-structuralism. While Saussure suggested that signs acquire
meaning through their difference from other signs (and thus a culture may be identified by its
difference from other cultures), Derrida suggested that the 'difference' is also 'deferred', a
duality that he defined in a new term 'différance'. The 'Third Space' can be compared to this
space of deferral and possibility (thus a culture's difference is never simple and static but
ambivalent, changing, and always open to further possible interpretation). In short, this is the
space of hybridity itself, the space in which cultural meanings and identities always contain
the traces of other meanings and identities. Therefore, Bhabha argues, 'claims to inherent
originality or purity of cultures are untenable, even before we resort to empirical historical
instances that demonstrate their hybridity'.
This view is comparable with Fanon's idea of the development of a radical and revolutionary
native intelligentsia, an élite that is in a liminal position with respect to the dominant and the
52
native cultures. Yet, ironically, it may be their very in-betweenness that allows a
revolutionary potential for embracing change, in fact cultural exchange. These members of
the elite are themselves the bearers of a hybrid identity and they construct their culture from
the national text translated into modern Western forms of information technology, language,
dress, transforming the meaning of the colonial inheritance into the liberatory signs of a free
people of the future'.
4.8. Summary
The history of globalization being embedded in the history of imperialism, it is
useful to look at the origins of the global economy within the imperial ideology.
Both phenomena are transcultural and are related to issues of hegemony and control.
In the context of globalization the issues raised by theories of Postnationalism are
extremely important.
The unit also presents the concept of otherness with respect to (post)colonialism.
4..9. End of Unit Assessment
- Point out the good and bad effects of globalization

- Why is globalization relevant to postcolonial studies?
- What is the role of the United States in globalization?
- What is the position taken by postcolonialist thinkers towards cultural
essentialism?
- What are the objectives of Postnationalism?
- What are the implications of seeing the colonized subject as “the other”?
- Make a brief presentation of the Lacanian theory of “the other” and “the
Other”.
53
UNIT FIVE: The Great Tradition
5.1. Introduction
Briefly presented in previous units, the contributions of Edward Said and Franz
Fanon are resumed here with more emphasis on the specificity of their work and,
in the case of Fanon, with a focus of national culture. Another major contribution
is also analyzed, Benedict Anderson’s view of nationalism.
5.2. Competences
The unit offers ample scope for text analysis, being thus oriented towards
developing more practical skills of interpreting, summarizing and systematizing
ideas.
Study time for UNIT FIVE: 2 hours
5.3. The East and West Divide
The principal features of postcolonialism's intellectual inheritance are realized and elaborated
in Edward Said’s Orientalism ( first published in 1978). Here Said betrays a relationship with
Marxism, a specifically poststructuralist understanding of the contiguity between colonial
power and Western knowledge, and a profound belief in the political and worldly obligations
of the postcolonial intellectual.
Commonly regarded as the catalyst and reference point for postcolonialism, Orientalism
represents the first phase of postcolonial theory. Rather than engaging with the ambivalent
condition of the colonial aftermath, it directs attention to the discursive and textual production
of colonial meanings and, concomitantly, to the consolidation of colonial hegemony. While
'colonial discourse analysis' is now only one aspect of postcolonialism, few postcolonial
critics dispute its contribution to subsequent theoretical developments.
54
Gayatri Spivak, for example, celebrated Said's book as the founding text or 'source book'
through which 'marginality' itself has acquired the status of a discipline in the Anglo-
American academy. In her words, 'the study of colonial discourse, directly released by work
such as Said's, has . . . blossomed into a garden where the marginal can speak and be spoken,
even spoken for. It is an important part of the discipline now' ( Spivak 1995: 56).
Let us briefly summarize some of the themes and concerns of this seminal book.
Orientalism is the first book in a trilogy devoted to an exploration of the historically
imbalanced relationship between the world of Islam, the Middle East, and the 'Orient' on the
one hand, and that of European and American imperialism on the other. While Orientalism
focuses on the nineteenth-century British and French imperialism, the two subsequent books
in this series, The Question of Palestine ( 1979) and Covering Islam ( 1981) foreground the
submerged or latent imperialism which informs the relationship between Zionism and
Palestine and that of the United States and the Islamic world.
The Orientalism series as a whole elaborates a unique understanding of

imperialism/colonialism as the epistemological and cultural attitude which accompanies the
domination and ruling of distant territories. As Said writes in his later book Culture and
Imperialism:
Neither imperialism nor colonialism is a simple act of accumulation and acquisition.

Both are supported and perhaps even impelled by impressive ideological formations
which include notions that certain territories and people require and beseech
domination, as well as forms of knowledge affiliated with that domination ( Said
1979: 8).
Orientalism is the first book in which Said systematically unmasks the ideological disguises
of imperialism. Its particular contribution to the field of anti-colonial scholarship inheres in its
painstaking exposition of the reciprocal relationship between colonial knowledge and colonial
power. It proposes that 'Orientalism' - or the project of teaching, writing about, and
researching the Orient - has always been an essential cognitive factor accompanying Europe's
imperial adventures in the hypothetical 'East'. Accordingly, it claims that the peculiarly
'Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient' ( Said
1979: 3) is inextricable from the peculiarly Western style of studying and thinking about the
55
Orient. In other words, its answer to the way the East was won suggests that we reconsider
some of the ways in which the East was known.
5.4. Nationalism and National Culture
It is generally acknowledged that nationalism was an important feature of decolonization

struggles in the third world. Thus, for all his reservations about cultural essentialism, Said
admits that:
Along with armed resistance in places as diverse as nineteenth century Algeria, Ireland
and Indonesia, there also went considerable efforts in cultural resistance almost
everywhere, the assertions of nationalist identities, and, in the political realm, the
creation of associations and parties whose common goal was self-determination and
national independence ( Said 1993: xii).
In seeking to negotiate the complex implications arising from 'the nationalism question',
postcolonial studies is forced to make an intervention into a controversial discourse. So while
Benedict Anderson argues that 'nation-ness is the most universally legitimate value in the
political life of our times' ( Anderson 1991, p. 3), at the same time, separatist appeals for
nationhood are generally regarded as symptoms of political illegitimacy. It would appear,
then, that while some nations are 'good' and progressive, others are 'bad' and reactionary. In
his illuminating essay, 'Nationalisms against the State', David Lloyd attributes the persistence
of this chronic distinction between 'good' and 'bad', or 'legitimate' and 'illegitimate',
nationalisms to a deeper contradiction that has always been part of the discourses surrounding
nationalism ( Lloyd 1983). The selective bias of Western anti-nationalism, he maintains,
emerges out of a historically deep-seated metropolitan antipathy toward anti-colonial
movements in the third world. Thus the anti-Western cultural nationalism of the third world
appears as totally different from the historical Western nationalism.
The legitimation of Western nationalism arises from its connection with modernity.
Writers like Ernst Gellner and Benedict Anderson, in particular, defend nationalism as the
only form of political organization which is appropriate to the social and intellectual
condition of the modern world. Gellner attributes the emergence of nationalism to the
epochal 'shift' from pre-industrial to industrial economies, and argues that, as forms of
56
social organization become more complex and intricate they come to require a more
homogenous and cooperative workforce and political context. Thus, industrial society
produces the economic conditions for national consciousness--which it consolidates
politically through the supervisory agency of the nation-State.
In a similar way, Anderson argues that the birth of nationalism in Western Europe is coeval
with the dwindling of religious modes of thought. The rationalist secularism of the
Enlightenment brings with it the abandonment of old systems of belief and sociality based on
divine kingship, religious community, sacred languages and cosmological consciousness. The
nation, then, is the product of a radically secular and modern imagination, invoked through
the cultural forms of the novel and newspaper in the godless expanse of what Anderson calls
'homogenous empty time'.
Franz Fanon – the early voice of postcolonialism

The following text is part of a speech given by Franz Fanon in 1959. Read it and summarize
the issues about the national culture of the colonized presented by Fanon. What kind of style
does the author use?
Speech by Frantz Fanon at the Congress of Black African Writers, 1959

Wretched of the Earth
Colonial domination, because it is total and tends to over-simplify, very soon manages to
disrupt in spectacular fashion the cultural life of a conquered people. This cultural obliteration
is made possible by the negation of national reality, by new legal relations introduced by the
occupying power, by the banishment of the natives and their customs to outlying districts by
colonial society, by expropriation, and by the systematic enslaving of men and women.
Three years ago at our first congress I showed that, in the colonial situation, dynamism is
replaced fairly quickly by a substantification of the attitudes of the colonising power. The area
of culture is then marked off by fences and 7signposts. These are in fact so many defence
57
mechanisms of the most elementary type, comparable for more than one good reason to the
simple instinct for preservation. The interest of this period for us is that the oppressor does not
manage to convince himself of the objective non-existence of the oppressed nation and its
culture. Every effort is made to bring the colonised person to admit the inferiority of his
culture which has been transformed into instinctive patterns of behaviour, to recognise the
unreality of his 'nation', and, in the last extreme, the confused and imperfect character of his
own biological structure.
Vis-à-vis this state of affairs, the native's reactions are not unanimous While the mass of the
people maintain intact traditions which are completely different from those of the colonial
situation, and the artisan style solidifies into a formalism which is more and more stereotyped,
the intellectual throws himself in frenzied fashion into the frantic acquisition of the culture of
the occupying power and takes every opportunity of unfavourably criticising his own national
culture, or else takes refuge in setting out and substantiating the claims of that culture in a
way that is passionate but rapidly becomes unproductive.
The common nature of these two reactions lies in the fact that they both lead to impossible
contradictions. Whether a turncoat or a substantialist, the native is ineffectual precisely
because the analysis of the colonial situation is not carried out on strict lines. The colonial
situation calls a halt to national culture in almost every field. Within the framework of
colonial domination there is not and there will never be such phenomena as new cultural
departures or changes in the national culture. Here and there valiant attempts are sometimes
made to reanimate the cultural dynamic and to give fresh impulses to its themes, its forms and
its tonalities. The immediate, palpable and obvious interest of such leaps ahead is nil. But if
we follow up the consequences to the very end we see that preparations are being thus made
to brush the cobwebs off national consciousness to question oppression and to open up the
struggle for freedom.
A national culture under colonial domination is a contested culture whose destruction is
sought in systematic fashion. It very quickly becomes a culture condemned to secrecy. This
idea of clandestine culture is immediately seen in the reactions of the occupying power which
interprets attachment to traditions as faithfulness to the spirit of the nation and as a refusal to
submit. This persistence in following forms of culture which are already condemned to
extinction is already a demonstration of nationality; but it is a demonstration which is a throw-
back to the laws of inertia. There is no taking of the offensive and no redefining of
relationships. There is simply a concentration on a hard core of culture which is becoming
more and more shrivelled up, inert and empty.
58
By the time a century or two of exploitation has passed there comes about a veritable
emaciation of the stock of national culture. It becomes a set of automatic habits, some
traditions of dress and a few broken-down institutions. Little movement can be discerned in
such remnants of culture; there is no real creativity and no overflowing life. The poverty of
the people, national oppression and the inhibition of culture are one and the same thing. After
a century of colonial domination we find a culture which is rigid in the extreme, or rather
what we find are the dregs of culture, its mineral strata. The withering away of the reality of
the nation and the death-pangs of the national culture are linked to each other in mutual
dependences. This is why it is of capital importance to follow the evolution of these relations
during the struggle for national freedom. The negation of the native's culture, the contempt for
any manifestation of culture whether active or emotional and the placing outside the pale of
all specialised branches of organisation contribute to breed aggressive patterns of conduct in
the native. But these patterns of conduct are of the reflexive type; they are poorly
differentiated, anarchic and ineffective. Colonial exploitation, poverty and endemic famine
drive the native more and more to open, organised revolt. The necessity for an open and
decisive breach is formed progressively and imperceptibly, and comes to be felt by the great
majority of the people. Those tensions which hitherto were non-existent come into being.
International events, the collapse of whole sections of colonial empires and the contradictions
inherent in the colonial system strengthen and uphold the native's combativity while
promoting and giving support to national consciousness.
These new-found tensions which are present at all stages in the real nature of colonialism
have their repercussions on the cultural plane. In literature, for example, there is relative over-
production. From being a reply on a minor scale to the dominating power, the literature
produced by natives becomes differentiated and makes itself into a will to particularism. The
intelligentsia, which during the period of repression was essentially a consuming public, now
themselves become producers. This literature at first chooses to confine itself to the tragic and
poetic style; but later on novels, short stories and essays are attempted. It is as if a kind of
internal organization or law of expression existed which wills that poetic expression become
less frequent in proportion as the objectives and the methods of the struggle for liberation
become more precise. Themes are completely altered; in fact, we find less and less of bitter,
hopeless recrimination and less also of that violent, resounding, florid writing which on the
whole serves to reassure the occupying power. The colonialists have in former times
encouraged these modes of expression and made their existence possible. Stinging
denunciations, the exposing of distressing conditions and passions which find their outlet in
59
expression are in fact assimilated by the occupying power in a cathartic process. To aid such
processes is in a certain sense to avoid their dramatisation and to clear the atmosphere. But
such a situation can only be transitory. In fact, the progress of national consciousness among
the people modifies and gives precision to the literary utterances of the native intellectual. The
continued cohesion of the people constitutes for the intellectual an invitation to go farther than
his cry of protest. The lament first makes the indictment; then it makes an appeal. In the
period that follows, the words of command are heard. The crystallization of the national
consciousness will both disrupt literary styles and themes, and also create a completely new
public. While at the beginning the native intellectual used to produce his work to be read
exclusively by the oppressor, whether with the intention of charming him or of denouncing
him through ethnical or subjectivist means, now the native writer progressively takes on the
habit of addressing his own people.
It is only from that moment that we can speak of a national literature. Here there is, at the
level of literary creation, the taking up and clarification of themes which are typically
nationalist. This may be properly called a literature of combat, in the sense that it calls on the
whole people to fight for their existence as a nation. It is a literature of combat, because it
moulds the national consciousness, giving it form and contours and flinging open before it
new and boundless horizons; it is a literature of combat because it assumes responsibility, and
because it is the will to liberty expressed in terms of time and space.
On another level, the oral tradition - stories, epics and songs of the people - which formerly
were filed away as set pieces are now beginning to change. The storytellers who used to relate
inert episodes now bring them alive and introduce into them modifications which are
increasingly fundamental. There is a tendency to bring conflicts up to date and to modernize
the kinds of struggle which the stories evoke, together with the names of heroes and the types
of weapons. The method of allusion is more and more widely used. The formula 'This all
happened long ago' is substituted by that of 'What we are going to speak of happened
somewhere else, but it might well have happened here today, and it might happen tomorrow'.
The example of Algeria is significant in this context. From 1952-3 on, the storytellers, who
were before that time stereotyped and tedious to listen to, completely overturned their
traditional methods of storytelling and the contents of their tales. Their public, which was
formerly scattered, became compact. The epic, with its typified categories, reappeared; it
became an authentic form of entertainment which took on once more a cultural value.
Colonialism made no mistake when from 1955 on it proceeded to arrest these storytellers
systematically.
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The contact of the people with the new movement gives rise to a new rhythm of life and to
forgotten muscular tensions, and develops the imagination. Every time the storyteller relates a
fresh episode to his public, he presides over a real invocation. The existence of a new type of
man is revealed to the public. The present is no longer turned in upon itself but spread out for
all to see. The storyteller once more gives free rein to his imagination; he makes innovations
and he creates a work of art. It even happens that the characters, which are barely ready for
such a transformation - highway robbers or more or less antisocial vagabonds - are taken up
and remodelled. The emergence of the imagination and of the creative urge in the songs and
epic stories of a colonised country is worth following. The storyteller replies to the expectant
people by successive approximations, and makes his way, apparently alone but in fact helped
on by his public, towards the seeking out of new patterns, that is to say national patterns.
Comedy and farce disappear, or lose their attraction. As for dramatisation, it is no longer
placed on the plane of the troubled intellectual and his tormented conscience. By losing its
characteristics of despair and revolt, the drama becomes part of the common lot of the people
and forms part of an action in preparation or already in progress.
Where handicrafts are concerned, the forms of expression which formerly were the dregs of
art, surviving as if in a daze, now begin to reach out. Woodwork, for .example, which
formerly turned out certain faces and attitudes by the million, begins to be differentiated. The
inexpressive or overwrought mask comes to life and the arms tend to be raised from the body
as if to sketch an action. Compositions containing two, three or five figures appear. The
traditional schools are led on to creative efforts by the rising avalanche of amateurs or of
critics. This new vigour in this sector of cultural life very often passes unseen; and yet its
contribution to the national effort is of capital importance. By carving figures and faces which
are full of life, and by taking as his theme a group fixed on the same pedestal, the artist invites
participation in an organized movement.
If we study the repercussions of the awakening of national consciousness in the domains of
ceramics and pottery-making, the same observations may be drawn. Formalism is abandoned
in the craftsman's work. Jugs, jars and trays are modified, at first imperceptibly, then almost
savagely. The colours, of which formerly there were but few and which obeyed the traditional
rules of harmony, increase in number and are influenced by the repercussion of the rising
revolution. Certain ochres and blues, which seemed forbidden to all eternity in a given
cultural area, now assert themselves without giving rise to scandal. In the same way the
stylisation of the human face, which according to sociologists is typical of very clearly
defined regions, becomes suddenly completely relative. The specialist coming from the home
61
country and the ethnologist are quick to note these changes. On the whole such changes are
condemned in the name of a rigid code of artistic style and of a cultural life which grows up at
the heart of the colonial system. The colonialist specialists do not recognize these new forms
and rush to the help of the traditions of the indigenous society. It is the colonialists who
become the defenders of the native style. We remember perfectly, and the example took on a
certain measure of importance since the real nature of colonialism was not involved, the
reactions of the white jazz specialists when after the Second World War new styles such as
the be-bop took definite shape. The fact is that in their eyes jazz should only be the
despairing, broken-down nostalgia of an old Negro who is trapped between five glasses of
whisky, the curse of his race, and the racial hatred of the white men. As soon as the Negro
comes to an understanding of himself, and understands the rest of the world differently, when
he gives birth to hope and forces back the racist universe, it is clear that his trumpet sounds
more clearly and his voice less hoarsely. The new fashions in jazz are not simply born of
economic competition. We must without any doubt see in them one of the consequences of
the defeat, slow but sure, of the southern world of the United States. And it is not utopian to
suppose that in fifty years' time the type of jazz howl hiccupped by a poor misfortunate Negro
will be upheld only by the whites who believe in it as an expression of nigger-hood, and who
are faithful to this arrested image of a type of relationship.
We might in the same way seek and find in dancing, singing, and traditional rites and
ceremonies the same upward-springing trend, and make out the same changes and the same
impatience in this field. Well before the political or fighting phase of the national movement
an attentive spectator can thus feel and see the manifestation of new vigour and feel the
approaching conflict. He will note unusual forms of expression and themes which are fresh
and imbued with a power which is no longer that of invocation but rather of the assembling of
the people, a summoning together for a precise purpose. Everything works together to awaken
the native's sensibility and to make unreal and inacceptable the contemplative attitude, or the
acceptance of defeat. The native rebuilds his perceptions because he renews the purpose and
dynamism of the craftsmen, of dancing and music and of literature and the oral tradition. His
world comes to lose its accursed character. The conditions necessary for the inevitable
conflict are brought together.
We have noted the appearance of the movement in cultural forms and we have seen that this
movement and these new forms are linked to the state of maturity of the national
consciousness. Now, this movement tends more and more to express itself objectively, in
institutions. From thence comes the need for a national existence, whatever the cost.
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A frequent mistake, and one which is moreover hardly justifiable is to try to find cultural
expressions for and to give new values to native culture within the framework of colonial
domination. This is why we arrive at a proposition which at first sight seems paradoxical: the
fact that in a colonized country the most elementary, most savage and the most
undifferentiated nationalism is the most fervent and efficient means of defending national
culture. For culture is first the expression of a nation, the expression of its preferences, of its
taboos and of its patterns. It is at every stage of the whole of society that other taboos, values
and patterns are formed. A national culture is the sum total of all these appraisals; it is the
result of internal and external extensions exerted over society as a whole and also at every
level of that society. In the colonial situation, culture, which is doubly deprived of the support
of the nation and of the state, falls away and dies. The condition for its existence is therefore
national liberation and the renaissance of the state.
The nation is not only the condition of culture, its fruitfulness, its continuous renewal, and its
deepening. It is also a necessity. It is the fight for national existence which sets culture
moving and opens to it the doors of creation. Later on it is the nation which will ensure the
conditions and framework necessary to culture. The nation gathers together the various
indispensable elements necessary for the creation of a culture, those elements which alone can
give it credibility, validity, life and creative power. In the same way it is its national character
that will make such a culture open to other cultures and which will enable it to influence and
permeate other cultures. A non-existent culture can hardly be expected to have bearing on
reality, or to influence reality. The first necessity is the re-establishment of the nation in order
to give life to national culture in the strictly biological sense of the phrase.
Thus we have followed the break-up of the old strata of culture, a shattering which becomes
increasingly fundamental; and we have noticed, on the eve of the decisive conflict for national
freedom, the renewing of forms of expression and the rebirth of the imagination. There
remains one essential question: what are the relations between the struggle - whether political
or military - and culture? Is there a suspension of culture during the conflict? Is the national
struggle an expression of a culture? Finally, ought one to say that the battle for freedom,
however fertile a posteriori with regard to culture, is in itself a negation of culture? In short is
the struggle for liberation a cultural phenomenon or not?
We believe that the conscious and organized undertaking by a colonized people to re-establish
the sovereignty of that nation constitutes the most complete and obvious cultural
manifestation that exists. It is not alone the success of the struggle which afterwards gives
validity and vigour to culture; culture is not put into cold storage during the conflict. The
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struggle itself in its development and in its internal progression sends culture along different
paths and traces out entirely new ones for it. The struggle for freedom does not give back to
the national culture its former value and shapes; this struggle which aims at a fundamentally
different set of relations between men cannot leave intact either the form or the content of the
people's culture. After the conflict there is not only the disappearance of colonialism but also
the disappearance of the colonized man.
This new humanity cannot do otherwise than define a new humanism both for itself and for
others. It is prefigured in the objectives and methods of the conflict. A struggle which
mobilizes all classes of the people and which expresses their aims and their impatience, which
is not afraid to count almost exclusively on the people's support, will of necessity triumph.
The value of this type of conflict is that it supplies the maximum of conditions necessary for
the development and aims of culture. After national freedom has been obtained in these
conditions, there is no such painful cultural indecision which is found in certain countries
which are newly independent, because the nation by its manner of coming into being and in
the terms of its existence exerts a fundamental influence over culture. A nation which is born
of the people's concerted action and which embodies the real aspirations of the people while
changing the state cannot exist save in the expression of exceptionally rich forms of culture.
The natives who are anxious for the culture of their country and who wish to give to it a
universal dimension ought not therefore to place their confidence in the single principle of
inevitable, undifferentiated independence written into the consciousness of the people in order
to achieve their task. The liberation of the nation is one thing; the methods and popular
content of the fight are another. It seems to me that the future of national culture and its riches
are equally also part and parcel of the values which have ordained the struggle for freedom.
And now it is time to denounce certain pharisees. National claims, it is here and there stated,
are a phase that humanity has left behind. It is the day of great concerted actions, and retarded
nationalists ought in consequence to set their mistakes aright. We, however, consider that the
mistake, which may have very serious consequences, lies in wishing to skip the national
period. If culture is the expression of national consciousness, I will not hesitate to affirm that
in the case with which we are dealing it is the national consciousness which is the most
elaborate form of culture.
The consciousness of self is not the closing of a door to communication. Philosophic thought
teaches us, on the contrary, that it is its guarantee. National consciousness, which is not
nationalism, is the only thing that will give us an international dimension. This problem of
national consciousness and of national culture takes on in Africa a special dimension. The
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birth of national consciousness in Africa has a strictly contemporaneous connexion with the
African consciousness. The responsibility of the African as regards national culture is also a
responsibility with regard to African-Negro culture. This joint responsibility is not the fact of
a metaphysical principle but the awareness of a simple rule which wills that every
independent nation in an Africa where colonialism is still entrenched is an encircled nation, a
nation which is fragile and in permanent danger.
If man is known by his acts, then we will say that the most urgent thing today for the
intellectual is to build up his nation. If this building up is true, that is to say if it interprets the
manifest will of the people and reveals the eager African peoples, then the building of a nation
is of necessity accompanied by the discovery and encouragement of universalising values. Far
from keeping aloof from other nations, therefore, it is national liberation which leads the
nation to play its part on the stage of history. It is at the heart of national consciousness that
international consciousness lives and grows. And this two-fold emerging is ultimately the
source of all culture.
5.6. Summary
This unit extends the presentation of three major texts in postcolonial studies:
Edward Said’s Orientalism, Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, and Franz
Fanon’s approach to national culture. The first one has been referred to several times
in this course, but is an essential text. Anderson’s work contributes to the
understanding of national culture, an issue also debated in a different way by Fanon
in a speech given as an original text and submitted for analysis above.
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UNIT SIX: Cultural Stereotypes and Colonial Mimicry
6.1. Introduction
The mechanisms of cultural representation and denigration specific to colonial
discourse are revealed in the construction of cultural stereotypes and in the
phenomenon of mimicry. Homi Bhabha, one of the greatest contemporary
postcolonial thinkers analyses these constructions and processes and in so doing
subverts the power strategies of the colonial discourse.
6.2. Competences
The analysis of cultural stereotypes and of mimicry brings a subtle understanding
of how the Other is constructed in Western discourse and reveals the role of
postcolonial discourse theory
Study time for UNIT SIX : 2 hours
6.3. Colonial Mimicry
Colonial mimicry is a widely used concept in postcolonial studies since Homi Bhaba made a
thorough and challenging analysis of the term in the chapter ‘Of Mimicry and man: the
ambivalence of colonial discourse’ from his famous book The Location of Culture (1994).
It basically refers to an imitation of colonial practices and ideas by the colonized subjects
without modification or adaptation to the specific location. Bhabha considers (post)colonial
mimicry as a process of cultural reflection initiated by the colonizing powers for purposes of
self-preservation, because the static condition of imitation is just a form of (accepted)
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subordination. Two aspects are important here. The first one is the association of mimicry
with colonial strategies of power and knowledge. The second aspect refers to the essential
subversive role played by it in the first stage of de-colonization, as a condition of passage to
the postcolonial condition.
Thus the concept is not only central in postcolonial studies, but it also becomes a general
instrument of clarification for processes of construction and reflection of cultural images in
the contemporary age. Bhabha himself relates it to Said’s idea of a tension in the postcolonial
discourse between the synchronic and diachronic vision, between the perception of a state of
affairs as permanent or in a continuous transformation.
Colonial mimicry can take various forms in diverse geographical areas, from the unreserved
acceptance of the dominant culture, to the acceptance by force of necessity of the economic
and/or military power. The colonizing powers do not generally take into account the specific
conditions of their colonial subjects and the cultural meanings they build define these peoples
as a collective otherness, not an individual one.
The analysis suggested by Bhabha follows the Lacanian model in comparing mimicry with
dissimulation, with the adoption of a motley image in a motley landscape. The subversive
force of imitation is given by a double vision, namely the revelation of the duplicity of the
colonial discourse in the post-Enlightenment age and deconstruction of its authority.
... colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a
difference that is almost the same, but not quite. Which is to say that the discourse of
mimicry is constructed around an ambivalence; in order to be effective, mimicry must
continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference. The authority of that mode
of colonial discourse that I have called mimicry is therefore stricken by an
indeterminacy: mimicry emerges as a representation of a difference that is itself a
process of disavowal. Mimicry is thus the sign of a double articulation: a complex
strategy of reform, regulation and discipline, which ‘appropriates’ the Other as it
visualizes power. Mimicry is also the sign of the inappropriate , however a difference
… intensifies surveillance, and poses an immanent threat to both ‘normalized’
knowledges and disciplinary powers. (Bhabha 1994:86)
67
An example for the duplicity of the colonial discourse is offered by the civilizing theory
according to which the colonial power brings a higher degree of civilization to a population
which is human, but not completely. It is significant that Bhabha considers that it is precisely
the techniques of domination of the imperialist discourse that reveal the inner weaknesses of
the system.
Bhabha illustrates the idea of colonial mimicry with literary examples, Conrad’s novel
Nostromo and V. S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men. This latter work presents a postcolonial
society in a remote tropical island whose inhabitants look like parodies of history in their
failed desire to look authentic. Ralph Singh’s reflection after the revolution in which he is
involved is revealing in this respect:
We pretend to be real, to be learning, to be preparing ourselves for life, we mimic men of the
New World, one unknown corner of it, with all its reminders of the corruption that came so
quickly to the new. (quoted in Bhabha 1994: 88).
6.4. Cultural Stereotypes
Stereotypes are very frequent discursive markers of colonialism, being often confused wit
prejudice, with which it is in fact closely associated. A stereotype is a commonly held public
belief about specific social groups, or types of individuals. Stereotypes are standardized and
simplified conceptions of groups, based on some prior assumptions. Generally speaking, these
"stereotypes" are not based on objective truth, but rather subjective and sometimes
unverifiable content-matter. In postcolonial studies stereotyping acquires a particular
importance as it reveals mechanisms of cultural denigration and domination. They are
therefore generally created by the colonizer and reflect the feeling of otherness, of difference,
most often racial and sexual difference. In fact they exaggerate cultural differences between
groups and during the colonial period, when the only voices that could be heard were those of
the Western countries, the stereotypes were the only source for building the image of the
colonial Other in the Eurocentric world. The dismantling of these clichés is therefore a
prerequisite of any postcolonial discourse.
68
In the chapter entitled “The Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination and the discourse of
colonialism” from The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha considers stereotyping the main
discursive strategy of colonialism, being a form of “knowledge and identification” based on
strategies of ambivalence, marginalization and an ideology of fixity. The ambiguity is given
by its reliance on something that already exists and at the same time must be continuously
repeated. Bhabha refers to Said’s discussion of the perception of the Orient by the Western
world as an illustration of how stereotyping works in “producing the colonized as a social
reality which is at once an ‘other’ and yet entirely knowable and visible” (Bhabha 1994: 70-
71).
6.5. Read the following article about cultural stereotypes and summarize the various
definitions given to the concept.
Open, Closed and Locked Images - by Ruth Lillhannus
Different scholars have defined the concept of cultural stereotypes in many different ways.
They were seen as “pictures in our heads” by Walter Lippmann (1949) who was the first to
use the concept as a description of human categorization of fellow beings. We need to stress,
though, that creating stereotypes is far more complicated than simply dividing up the world
into categories. It also involves connecting the created categories with values, equipping the
categories with an ideational label and an emotional charge. Thus, stereotypes often contain
the presupposition that one’s own group represents the normal, or even universal and that
one’s own culture and its socially construed concepts of reality is superior and normative in
relation to other cultures and world-views.
A useful definition of stereotypes, has been given by Arthur Asa Berger(1999), who regards
stereotypes as: “an image of a category commonly shared by a certain group, a grossly
simplified notion of how individuals that are members of a group are constituted”.
An important point is the social character of the stereotypes:
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they are not just one person’s private attitude but are always shared with a larger
sociocultural group: they constitute a form of social cognition inherited through
socialization (van Dijk 1987; Geels & Wikström 1993).
Berger also emphasizes that stereotypes consist of suppositions of other groups as lacking in
diversity and nuance; i.e. one regards all the persons as cast in the same mould. They are
simplifications that prevent people from seeing individuals as they truly are. Once such
simplifications have become part of ones way of thinking, they are hard to change as they
often serve as self-fulfilling prophecies. Hence, the view of reality is guided by the stereotype,
not the other way around. The research on stereotypes has hitherto quite heavily rested on the
basic premise that our reality is socially constructed. There is nevertheless another
individually based dimension to this general view. Individuals are different, and therefore, so
are also our views of reality, which are affected by factors like personal experience and self-
reflection. This also influences our perception of the stereotype and of ‘the other’.
Many researchers view stereotypes as undesirable and superficial demonstrations of ignorance

(Hofstede 1994). Nevertheless, stereotypes can also be viewed as necessary tools in the
human effort to categorise: the process by which we try to sort out the flow of phenomena and
experiences we encounter and structure it into manageable wholes. It is an indispensable way
of getting along and a way to prevent chaos from breaking loose in our inner world and in our
relations. In research, stereotypes can be separated from concepts such as prejudice,
categorization and generalizations, although in practice they are often similar.
Stereotyping is a necessary tool for the mind in processing and interpreting reality. Without
drawers to sort our experiences into, we can neither manage our everyday life nor find
meaning in the world around us. It is when these images become locked and too emotionally
charged that problems arise.
6.6. Summary
This unit deals with two issues that reveal the hidden forces of the postcolonial
discourse, mimicry and cultural stereotypes. Relying mainly on Homi Bhabha’s
analyses in The Location of Culture, the unit provides the arguments and examples
necessary in understanding these complex social and cultural phenomena.
70
FINAL ASSIGNMENT
Write an essay about cultural stereotypes you are familiar with and their effects. Choose
examples from a situation in which there is a dominating culture and (a) dominated one(s).
REFERENCES
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London: Verso, 1983.
Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin. Post-colonial studies: the key concepts.
London and New York: Routledge, 1994
Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back. Theory and
Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures, 2nd Edition Routledge 2002.
Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1994
Fanon, Franz, Black skin, white masks. New York : Grove Press, 2008
Fanon, Franz, Speech to Congress of Black African Writers. In Wretched of the Earth
London: Pelican. 1959
Gellner, Ernest. Nation and Nationalism. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1983.
Gilman, Sander Lawrence , Difference and pathology : stereotypes of sexuality, race, and
madness. Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University Press, 1990
Ruth Lillhannus, Open, Closed, and Locked Images.Cultural Stereotypes and the
Symbolic Creation of Reality. in Intercultural Communication, 2002, April, issue 5. URL:
http://www.immi.se/intercultural/.
71
Lloyd, David, Culture and the State. N.Y.: Routledge 1997
Mohanty, Chandra, Feminism without borders : decolonizing theory, practicing solidarity

Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006
Pratt, Mary Louise, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation.. London and
New York: Routledge, 1992
Richter, Gerhard - Sites of Indeterminacy and the Spectres of Eurocentrism . In Culture,

Theory & Critique, 2002, 43(1), 51± 65
Said, Edward, Culture and Imperialism. London: Chatto & Windus, 1993
Said, Edward, Orientalism. N.Y.: Vinatage Books 1979
Scholte, Ian Aart, „Beyond the Buzzword: Towards a Critical Theory of Globalization”.
In Kofman, Eleonore (ed.), Globalization: Theory and Practice. London: Pinter 1996.
Spivak, Gayatri Ch, In Other Worlds. Essays in Cultural Politics. N.Y. Routledge 1988.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, The Spivak Reader (Ed. Donna Landry). N.Y. Routledge 1995
Weber, Max, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Mineola, N.Y. : Dover
Publications, 2003.
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UNIVERSITATEA TRANSILVANIA DIN BRAȘOV

Centrul de Învăţământ la Distanţă

AUTOR: Liliana HAMZEA †

Unit One. Defining the Field of Postcolonialism ………………………….5

1.3. Basic Definitions

Unit Two. Terminology and Ideological Borders ………….………………. 20

2.3. African-American and Postcolonial Studies

Unit Three. Race, Ethnicity, Gender, Class……………..…………………… 29

Mid-term Assignment ……………………………………………………… 43

4.3. Defining Globalization

Unit Five. The Great Tradition ………………………..………………………..54

5.3. The East and West Divide

Unit Six. Cultural Stereotypes and Colonial Mimicry ………………………….66

6.3. Colonial Mimicry

Final Assignment …………………………………………………………………..72

The focus is on colonial / postcolonial discourse, its construction and implications in

The specific competences developed by the course are:

Average Study Time

Study time for UNIT ONE: 3 hours

1.3. Basic definitions

Postcolonialism is a specifically postmodern intellectual discourse, which consists of

1.4. Theorists about Postcolonialism

The ultimate goal of postcolonialism is combating the remaining effects of colonialism on

1.7. Post-colonialism / Postcolonialism

An equally fundamental constraint is attention to precise location. Every colonial encounter or

1.9. End of Unit Assessment

- Discuss the distinction between colonialism and imperialism

Study time for UNIT TWO: 2 hours

2.3. African-American and Postcolonial Studies

The history of the struggle for self-determination by African Americans is historically

The term was adopted by philosophers as an alternative to 'otherness' to register a change in

Importantly, dialogue is only possible with an 'other', so alterity, in Bakhtin's formulation, is

The binary logic of imperialism is a development of that tendency of Western thought in

An important consequence of this disruption of imperial binary systems is a particular

2.7. Theoretical Models of the World Order

Imperial Europe became defined as the 'centre' in a geography at least as metaphysical as

2.9. End of Unit Assessment

Answer the following questions

- How does the concept of alterity relate to postcolonialism?

- What is the objective and area of investigation of African American studies?

- What are the ideological implications of anti-colonialism?

- How does binarism function in imperialistic thought?

- Explain the centre-margin metaphor.

Study time for UNIT THREE: 3 hours

A group that is socially distinguished or set apart, by others and/or by itself,

3.5. Franz Fanon’s Contribution

3.6. Feminism and Postcolonialism

3.7. Class and Postcolonialism

3.9. End of Unit Assessment

- Give a definition of ethnicity and refer to its components

Sites of Indeterminacy and the Spectres of Eurocentrism

Study time for UNIT FOUR: 2 hours

4.3. Defining Globalization

4.4. Globalization, Hybridity, Diaspora

4.5. Other/ Otherness

4..9. End of Unit Assessment

- Point out the good and bad effects of globalization

Study time for UNIT FIVE: 2 hours

5.3. The East and West Divide

The Orientalism series as a whole elaborates a unique understanding of

Neither imperialism nor colonialism is a simple act of accumulation and acquisition.

5.4. Nationalism and National Culture

It is generally acknowledged that nationalism was an important feature of decolonization

5.5. Unit Assessment